The Good and the Ugly, and the Not Too Bad

The Good

 Another day locating graves of distant kin took me, again, to a family cemetery I never heard about before. Turns out that Br'er has a veritable bunny-load of family cemeteries dating from the earliest days of the area. Most of the counties down in these parts were created in the early 1800s and Br'er's ancestors were among the first to jump into the area. And they bred like, well, rabbits. As a result they started various and sundry family cemeteries as they spread out.

The initial goal was to find a cousin, the granddaughter of one of Br'er's 5th Great-Grandfathers. The description mentioned that it was about 100 yards back off the road. Great. Cow Pasture, here I come!

I was pleasantly surprised to find a VERY well maintained little site, fenced off from the surrounding cattle. Most of the time I have to fight weeds, briers, brambles, and other such growth to reach the graves. Not so this time. Drive right up to an actual gate and walk in. It looks like a professionally maintained commercial cemetery! Mowed grass, open space, gorgeous place!

As there were only about 120 graves recorded, auditing the entire place only took an hour or two to complete. And there were some 8 or 9 memorials that were not in Find A Grave yet. When I was done, everyone was identified and GPS tagged.

There was even one marker with a symbol that we have never seen before:

We have seen various examples of the Pointing Hand before but never one holding a Cross. And if you are curious, yes, this person passed away at age 25. Sad, but never as sad as the numerous graves of infants and children that are inevitable in these cemeteries.

Good deed for the day done, several hours of daylight remaining, and better weather than I deserve, I decided to see if there were any additional cemeteries close by. Especially any with open photo requests. There are two within about half a mile, both with requests. Excellent! And they appear to be from the same core family. Plus, they appear to be related to at least one person who married one of my distant cousins.

Being a bass-ackwards type person I naturally head for the second cemetery first. Not only is it closer but it only has 8 listed graves so it should take mere minutes to investigate and audit. I always prefer to complete and audit once I start it. Especially in these remote locations that take an hour or so to reach.

The Ugly

I knew I should have brought a sharp machete.

Ok, it wasn't that bad. But there is enough growth that a machete would have been useful. And true to the description, it was off the road and in the brush. At least a couple of markers are visible from the road.

Note the large headstone just left of center in the last photo. I was standing on the other side of it at one point updating some information on my smartphone. I was close enough to it that I could easily rest a drink on top of it without moving. As I stood there I heard a rumbling kind of noise. As I had not had anything to eat that day (don't ask!) I merely attributed the sounds to my stomach making its emptiness known to all.

I then moved several steps away from it and heard the sounds again. But this time they were further away from me and seemed to be emanating from the headstone instead of me.

To steal a line from Richard Pryor's character, Mudbone, "That's when I put my hand on my gun, your honor." (Yes. When I am in these remote location I carry a firearm. Especially when I am in these remote wooded locations.) Hearing scratching from graves is somewhat unnerving. I am only glad this was full daylight and not after sunset! Casting my eyes about I spotted a rodent burrow. Ah-ha! There is the fecking culprit. Had that little bastard poked his head out I would have shot him for scaring the hell out of me!

The unwritten stories from these places always fascinate me. This place had several. Right up front is how one man came to have more than one marker. The first was clearly his original headstone placed there contemporaneous to his burial. The second was his VA issued later for his service as a Confederate Soldier. 

Yes, the US Government issued (and still does under the proper conditions) grave markers for Confederate Veterans. Most people are not aware that a law was passed making Confederate Vets US Veterans for these and other purposes.

Another question was what was the cemetery like when the last burial took place in 1931.

I note that some one has placed an infant listed as buried here based on the headstone in another cemetery entirely. Things like this I note to follow-up on to get corrected in Find A Grave when I am back home and in front of a real computer. There are also about 5 obvious unmarked graves as indicated by depressions in the ground with accompanying field stone markers. I add these to Find A Grave almost doubling the number of graves in the cemetery.

The Not Too Bad

From there it is off to the other cemetery from the same family. It is considerably larger with greater than 200 listed graves. 

Now a bit of experience in the fine art of Cemetery Cavorting has taught me to took at all the data before I move to a location. Especially when the on-line map show me that I have to traipse across a pasture to get to the location. In those moments I make certain to look at the wider map and satellite view of the area. Sure enough there appears to be a drive way accessing the site and it should be about 100 yards BEFORE the routing software tells me to go.

Yup. Driveway. Feck. There is some seriously high grass between the wheel ruts. Note to self: Go slow and take extra care. If this is not the right place then I could be force to back out - there may not be space to turn the car around.

Sure enough, some 200+ yards off the road is the cemetery. And it is the second largest family cemetery I have ever seen! I just hope I can complete auditing it before I have to leave. Fortunately for me there is ample open space to park and turn the car around for my departure.

This is no normal family cemetery! And it is active! I find one grave dating from Aug 2019. There is plenty of open spaces for additional graves and there are pipes driven into the ground in a pretty obvious effort to mark off individual plots of multiple graves. 

I was not able, alas, to fulfill the photo requests. Those are for graves dating back to the early and mid 1800s, While there are several graves marked and unmarked that could date from that era, there are unfortunately none with surviving markings that I can attribute to any of the requests.

It is obvious where there would have been something originally set into the markers listing the deceased's Name, and Birth and Death Dates. Sadly, all that information is long lost.

Equally sad at the children's markers that not only cannot be read in their present state, are literally 'decomposing'. I tried to move one in order to attempt to read it only to have the stone literally crumble in my fingertips.  It was like trying to pick up a dried sand castle. Any coherence it once had does not survive touch.

I could make a stab at identifying them as a group based on where they were in relation to other nearby markers, and by whose graves I did not positively locate. But that would be all. There was no way to positively deduce which grave was whose at this point. 

I was able to complete the audit with plenty of light left. But it took a lot out of me to do so.

One thing kept gnawing at my thoughts the whole time. It was only when I was getting ready to leave that what had been teasing my brain the whole time was a large, old oak tree one the edge of the space. I finally realized that it reminded me of the Whomping Willow from Harry Potter!

At least it was not taunting me with the sounds of burrowing rodents!

St Paul Baptist Church

 There is an old saying about how something is always easy to them what ain't gotta do it. I thought I had learned that lesson long ago. And perhaps I had. But I received a refresher course today. 

I need to set the scene properly.

Not that I am old (ok. I am old), but in a rather unusual set of circumstances I have lived on the same street all but about the first 18 months I have been alive. Almost all of that time in one of two adjacent houses. Explaining at would take far too much time and would be tangential to the main tale. Just accept that I have been in the immediate area a considerable time. And as that covered my post diaper childhood you can imagine that it also involved a great deal of rambling through the surrounding vicinity. There weren't many places we did not trespass on investigate.

Less than half a mile from the homestead sits a house with what we all assumed as kids was a massive front yard. Lots in the area at that time averaged about a half acre. Some were larger, some smaller. This place is closer to a full acre with half that being the front yard. 

Or so we thought.

Not all that many years ago we learned that the open expanse in front of the house was actually a cemetery. Understand that there were no markers or monuments of any kind on it for years upon years. Suddenly as we passed by (doubtless on our way to something we should not have been doing) we see standing there a large granite marker reading 'St Paul Baptist Church Cemetery'. Over the years following about 3 or 4 individual markers were placed. Whether these are on the exact spots of the graves or not I cannot say. Now to say I was taken aback about there being a cemetery from a long gone church is to understate the case in the extreme.

Much as I tried to get more details on the church there simply wasn't much to glean. Even newspaper archives were coming up dry (so far - still searching). What I did manage to find at one point was a minor blurb from one of the local TV station news show that covered the highlights. Even that was woefully lacking in any real details and confirmed sources. Just a recap of claims.

Basically it was not one of the better periods in our social history. We are talking about Georgia, relatively near Atlanta, Decatur, and Stone Mountain (the granite mountain and the city). The church was established some time before the late 1910s (perhaps much earlier that then), and was a Black Congregation. At some point in the 1950s (perhaps 1960s) a certain group of people decided that the church had to go. There seems to be little doubt that this was on racial/racist grounds. The precise Whats, Whens, and Whos are all but impossible for me to pin down. But the bottom line is that the church relocated and the cemetery was left behind and was not tended or maintained. 

At some point in the ensuing years a few descendants of those interred there stepped up to reclaim it. Hence the markers and monuments. There were, according to the one report I was able to find, accusations that several graves were paved over. Apparently there were attempts to determine if this was the case but they were, at best, inconclusive. There is a map of the larger area from 1915 but it is of little help as the quality is simply not sufficient to accurately place many sites on a current map.

But until today there were only about 4 memorials in Find A Grave for this cemetery. Clearly, if this was an operating church graveyard for decades then there should be many more than 4 graves. So I started delving into the larger local newspaper archives looking for obituary or death notices mentioning the church. I managed to add about 13 memorials based on this. I then tried to find these people in Ancestry so I could include their birth year, at least, if not definitive birth and death details.

What an exercise in frustration that turned out to be. Which brings up the re-learned lesson. 

Anyone who has done any amount of genealogy research at all knows well the frustration of not finding any records. Or what you find being so vague that you cannot possibly link it to the person you are researching which any degree of confidence. But unless the person you are researching is 6, 7, 8, or more generations back, or is an immigrant whose name was changed or came from somewhere where records do not exist or are not accessible. it takes a while to hit that wall. People living in the 1930s or 1940s in the States are generally not that hard to research.

So here I was, researching a Black church graveyard. The people I was finding had died anywhere from 1928 to about 1949. Two were children, one 8 years old, another only about 6 months. I could find death certificates for several, though their details about parents, etc. were often DK - Don't Know.

And the majority? They might as well have never existed as far as the records are concerned. No Census entries. No Death Certificates. And recorded births? Don't be silly. 

I have long known that for Black people tracing their family there is a massive, almost impenetrable wall immediately before the 1870 US Census. That being the first census where the former slaves were enumerated by name. Prior to that they were usually just counted by sex and age as property to be taxed. What I never really grasped is just how late in history that wall continued to exist for so many. Yes, there was Segregation, Jim Crow, Oppression, and all that baggage. I just never knew (or appreciated) how much all that pushed into basic records of the time. Nor how insanely difficult it is for Blacks today to find ancestors and relatives in the records less than a century old.

Researching is always easy for them what ain't doing the research. And only them what is doing it can appreciate just how hard it really is.

Rehoboth Cemetery

 There are dangers to getting lost, though you would not expect one of these to be finding what at first glace appears to be an old cemetery. As goes the old saying, looks can be deceiving. 

Having completed his mission to complete a full search of the cemetery where one of his great-aunts and her husband are buried in search of their markers (turns out they don't have markers - and there are two burials in their plot that are totally unexplained thus making for ANOTHER mystery to plague me - but that is a whole 'nother story for another time), Br'er was scampering off to another location by dead reckoning. 

Turns out his navigation was dead wrong. He wasn't precisely lost, mind you. But he found a really long way around to his destination. Out on a seriously 'out in the country' road he spied an interesting cemetery and decided to investigate it, if for no other reason than to stretch his legs a bit. This led to what that little girl experienced chasing a snowy bunny - a proverbial trip down the rabbit hole! What was to be a few minutes pause en route between destinations turned into a two day ordeal!

Any visit to a cemetery begins with pulling it up on Find A Grave to gather some basic information: How old is it? How many graves are recorded? Anyone famous or interesting? Any noted description or history? Any photo requests outstanding?

There is a photo request, so mental note taken to look for it (even though a problem has been flagged on the request). And there are some fairly old markers, so the brief stop is definitely going to stretch out a bit.

One of Br'er's many quirks is looking for military headstones. One of those is spotted straight off. But  either the marker has settled or the surrounding soil has risen over the years to obscure details at the bottom of the market. I could still see markings, but could not make out the details, nor determine what it said.

I usually pull up Find A Grave first and check it against the marker. Is something missing or in error? Is there a photo? GPS location?

In this case Find A Grave had only the name and cemetery. No birth and death dates. Was that what was at the buried bottom of the stone? Using a stout stick, I excavated to the base (the marker was set in a cement base) and revealed not only his unit but his birth and death dates. For whatever reason no one had made the effort to gather this data before.

Yes, yes. I added the data and photos to the Find A Grave memorial record.

There's at least one good deed for the day done!

But as I continued I started into a full audit of the cemetery. In the August heat and rain this was far from the wisest of choices. Especially as I came wholly unprepared for such an undertaking. I had brought none of the usual tools needed. No gloves, bug spray, pruning clippers, etc. 

What the hell. I am already started and daylight is burning. Let's do this!

Using a grid search I carefully pull up each marker in Find A Grave and insure that the facts are recorded, there is a photo of the marker(s), and the grave has its GPS location tagged at a minimum. This leads me to add several memorials that are not yet in Find A Grave. It also leads me to the realization that, all appearances to the contrary, this is very much an active cemetery. The last burial was about a year previous in 2019! Not at all what I expected.

Several hours later and several brier scratches to boot (not to mention the loss of a pound or two in water leaking from my skin) I am forced by nature to give up for the day. A light sprinkle, or even a short downpour, isn't enough to make old Br'er run for cover. But a torrential rain coupled with lightning will do the trick every time.

Just as well as I want to do some research on one grave. There is an infant marker with the surname of some of my ancestors from this area. Now I must learn if he is a relation or not.

I will leave off the hours spent on the search. The bottom line is that he is a 3rd cousin twice removed. And being the only one in the entire cemetery with that surname it makes for YAM (Yet Another Mystery). How did he come to be buried here of all possible locations? Alas, there is no way to every learn for certain.

All my research turns up something I wish I had had at the beginning: Someone make a detailed list of all the headstones and names back about 20 years previous organizing them in something of a Row and Column list. I had difficulties locating some graves that day. Having something giving me a better idea of who is next to who is a big help. So I bookmark the web page so I can reference it on site the next day.

Oh, yes. There has to be a second day. I am too committed to this now to quit before I have completed the audit.

Finding the previous list and returning paid dividends. First, I was able to locate one grave that was only ever marked by a funeral home "temporary" name plate in 1959. Knowing where the grave should be based on nearby marked graves I poked about a but and uncovered the nameplate. It had fallen over and been covered with leaves and weeds. I reset it as best I could and made certain to update the Find A Grave memorial with a photo and GPS coordinates. It may well be in a few years that that GPS tag is the only thing confirming where the grave is.

And I was able to find a marker for that photo request despite someone in the past saying there was no marker for the child (a distinct possibility for any child born in 1870 and dead by 1871). 

Another good deed accomplished. I think that clears my quota for those through 2025.

Add in identifying a couple of duplicate memorials and getting those corrected, adding about a dozen new memorials, and fully auditing a cemetery and you have a rather productive weekend!

A few random thoughts before closing: 

Another example where the previous list of graves and general locations paid off. This marker was totally covered by debris. Because I knew where it should be I was able to dig about a bit and uncover it. This is the first - and probably last - photo of it. I wish I had the time, skill, and wealth to restore markers like this.

Spotting bones in a cemetery is usually cause for alarm. Fortunately I could readily discern that these are not human.

Locklin Cemetery

 The allure of a road named for a cemetery is simply too strong to long ignore. Add in the facts that the name is known to be associated with Br'er's distant kin starting over two centuries back AND that it is smack in the area where all those kinfolk lived, and, well, checking it out becomes something of a moral imperative!

These days a LOT of initial research about where to go scampering is done on the internet. Learn what should be there, who should be there, what kind of access there is, and whether any distant relations might be buried there. Let's face facts - it is not possible to check every interesting old cemetery in the immediate area. And that only gets exponentially worse as one moves farther out from the home hutch.

So pick and choose are the order of the day. That means trying to stick to known people on the family tree, or the occasional famous grave or really interesting monument. That is not to say Br'er doesn't stop in on the occasional old cemetery on a whim. He does. More on that when I post about Rehobeth Cemetery in the future.

In this case the initial link is a 3rd cousin thrice removed who did not survive even his first year. Always a sad case to find. Pushing a bit further and it is clear that there are several more distant relatives there. Cousins all of various distance and generation. Time to go exploring. 

Ol' Br'er's nerves always get to twitching when it is obvious that there has to be some level of trespassing done to get where he aims to be. This was one of those cases. The cemetery is supposed to be a few yards off the road in a stand of trees between two houses. Out in the countryside. Where folks learn to shoot young and to be damned accurate. And usually do not cotton to strangers traipsing about their land without permission.

(sigh) No guts, no glory. In I go.

Fortunately there is not a lot of underbrush to hamper progress and visibility is good meaning and vertical markers should be readily visible at a distance. All this means saved steps. No need to grid search the area as would be the case if all the markers were flat.

Pausing to look around just a few feet into the trees and damned if I don't spot the cemetery! It is always better to be lucky than good.

(Ok. I stole the photos from Find A Grave. These are far superior to the ones I took.)

At least one marker previously photographed has gone missing or has fallen and been covered with leaves and weeds. I must confess that the layout has me perplexed. The graves are oriented on the East-West line as is traditional in Christian cemeteries (though less observed in recent times). But the border wall is not. This has the graves at an angle within the borders. Why? 

In researching how everyone here is related (and all those with names are, though three are spouses of blood kin) I uncovered a sad mystery.

At some point in 1978 - some 52 years after the wife died - relatives of one couple interred here had them disinterred and moved to a large city cemetery. Reasons were not stated (that I have been able to uncover), but I can easily imagine that they wanted their ancestors somewhere better maintained than the original family cemetery out in the woods. In and of itself this is not particularly odd or noteworthy.

It is what they did not do that is sad if not criminal.

They left the couple's infant child behind.

This couple was born in the mid 1800s, before "The Recent Unpleasantness", They married in at the end of January 1868,  a few years after the war ended. Later that year they had their first child. Their only child. There is no way of knowing whether the child was stillborn or lived a short time. But what we can state for certain is that it did not survive long enough to even be named. 

Whatever day the child was born, it died two days after Christmas 1868. And it was loved enough that its parents managed to purchase a headstone for it in the days of Reconstruction in the South when few had money to spare for luxuries.

They left the child behind. How? Why? I will never know. Perhaps that is best because I believe, were I to meet them face to face I might be moved to violence.

Pentecost Methodist? Are you serious?

Once more Mrs. B'rer and Old B'rer scampered off into the hinterlands locating graves of distant kin. In this case a 4th Great Uncle (on the branch what can't spell right - these are 'eth' instead of the correct 'ith' Griffiths. 

Let's face it. Spelling was highly variable in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this case we have brothers (two of several) where one used 'eth' and the other 'ith' spellers. No one can say why this was.

In this case the 4th Great Uncle, his wife, and a spinster daughter (She passed away at age 65 having never married. That is the very definition of 'Spinster'!). But also an infant that could not immediately be placed. The infant's birth and death made it highly unlikely that he was the son of B'rer's uncle. A little digging revealed that he was a grandson of B'rer's great uncle. Pity. The little fella lived but a scant 18 days.

Spinster Cousin (flat stone), 4th Great Uncle, 4th Great Aunt (upright markers), and infant cousin (flat marker)

Infant's stone held up for photo (normally laying flat)

But finding the child's stone and reading it firsthand showed that his Find A Grave entry in error. His name was totally wrong and he was not linked to his parents. Both things have now been corrected.

That is the least we can do to keep his short life from being totally forgotten.

Before we could locate the graves we sought, we noticed something we did not anticipate at all: A Revolutionary War Veteran!

And he explained the oddity of a Pentecost Methodist Church!

The church is indeed a Methodist Church. But is it named for the man who founded it - one William Pentecost. Our Revolutionary War veteran was also a Methodist preacher!

William Pentecost's marker

The number of Patriots we are finding in these far-flung places is astounding. Not at all what we expected given how remote the area was at the time.

Thyatira

"They call the wind 'Thyatira'". At least that was what kept bouncing around old B'rer's brain every time he saw the name.

B'rer and the Missus were out in the hinterlands once again and spotted a sign:

Now we've all used the term 'frontier', but seldom does it sink in just what that means and where it was at various points in history. In basic, generalistic terms it refers to the outer limit of "civilized" settlements. The Frontier differs from the boundaries of a State or Territory in that it is generally not under the jurisdiction of a formal government. That is, it is more the "wilds". As (cough) Civilization moves in and takes hold, and formal government is enacted, what the Frontier (it was originally the Front Tier, but that is a much longer and convoluted matter!) is pushed out. So it was that what was deemed "The Frontier" in the United States varied over the decades and centuries. In Colonial times places like Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, most of Georgia, and other 'eastern' lands were The Frontier. As these lands were populated, the States grew and the Frontier was pushed westward.

In 1796 the land where this church sits were barely out of the official Frontier stage. In fact, this area had only been an official part of the State of Georgia a mere 10 years. And we are talking about a church that was established only 13 years after the end of the American Revolution. You are not getting much older unless you start looking at any Native Tribes who previously occupied the area. Raids and attacks were not exactly over at this point! Let's just say that the locals were not always welcoming of the newcomers.

So seeing anything away from the original Parishes (Didn't know that Georgia started with Parishes and changed to Counties later? Well you learned a thing!) dating from that period makes the old ears perk up! There weren't a lot of them to begin with and few survive to this day. They are all worthy of exploration.

Mrs. B'rer got a good laugh when B'rer tried pronouncing the name. It was not one he had heard of before let alone tried speaking aloud. Apparently it is Thy-a-teerah. 

Go figure.

Sadly, everything from the early days was either a field stone or was a wooden marker long disintegrated. More permanent markers tended to date from the late 1800s on.

Mrs. B'rer asked across the cemetery what the USS Akron was. My ears perked up.

This is footage of the airship the year before it crashed at sea and was lost taking 73 of the 76 member crew with it.

Almost everyone knows of the Hindenberg Disaster, largely because of the dramatic film of the event. Both ships were Zeppelins/Dirigibles  (A Zeppelin or Dirigible differs from a Blimp by having a rigid frame. You can see the frame of the Hindenburg in the crash film and that of the Akron in photos in the Wiki link above).

Turns out that one of the crew from the airship has a marker in the cemetery. This is almost certainly a cenotaph as I am relatively certain that few of the victim's remains were recovered.

Why all this interest? The Akron was a greater disaster in terms of loss of life than the Hindenburg. Indeed, it had greater than DOUBLE the fatalities (73) of the Hindenburg (35). It remains (and unless some twist of fate resurrects the use of rigid frame airships will forever be) the greatest airship disaster in history.

Think of the Akron as the airship equivalent to the Sultana. Never heard of the Sultana? Bet you have heard of the Titanic, though. Numbers vary, but in most respects the Sultana surpasses the Titanic as a worse (the worse?) maritime disaster. It was a riverboat with a capacity of 461 passengers and crew. It had 2,137 people on board when its boiler exploded and it sank. Depending on whose numbers you believe, it had more fatalities than the Titanic. To have been carrying the same level of excess passengers as the Sultana the Titanic would have had to had a over 16,100 people on board instead of the 2,208 it actually had!

Look at all the learning you are getting today!

If you are curious, William's rating was Pattern Maker - 1st  Class. The acronyms for Naval Ratings (all military ratings and ranks for that matter) could almost make for a book themselves. They are incredibly varied. If you pause to consider this one, it begins to make sense. An airship has a cloth or material covering made of many different sections. The same holds true for much of the interior as well. Whenever something had to be repaired, a pattern was necessary. And someone had to draw them up. Hence a Pattern Maker rating. Not something you would likely see today.

No doubt that William was excited to be so far from his country roots. To be in the service, seeing the country and world. Pity he did not live long enough to return home with all the tales of his adventure.

Oodles of Disappointment

Virus be damned! Mrs. B'rer bailed out of the warren and scampered into the hinterland recently. The weather was simply too gorgeous to all it to be wasted. We declared it a 'medically necessary' excursion - we all need sunlight to make Vitamin D!

Many times in our excursions back and forth to old B'rer's ancestral grounds we had noticed a sign for a 'Smith Cemetery Rd". This time we determined to check it out and see what was to be seen.

Our hopes rose when we transitioned from asphalt to a gravel road. All the best stuff has directions that include "turn off the paved road". Mrs. B'rer immediately started calling out "Crack House" in a throwback reference to that extremely risky excursion to one of her ancestor's resting place.

I had to point out to her that we were nowhere near Crack House territory. That was clear based on the quality of the homes and the presence of actual new construction.

We then turned a corner and I had to reconsider my argument. Oy! Move over Fred Sandford. There is some serious junk going on here!

We located the cemetery and were pleased to see a well maintained, attractive family cemetery. Even more interesting is that it is clearly active. The latest burial being January 2020. That is most unusual in such situations.

Many stones were clearly later placements for older graves, and many had no dates for the lifespans of those they note.

But one was of particular interest.

The location, name (this surname is the only one in the cemetery), the minimal but provoking inscription, the age, and the fact that the exact style marker is used for others who passed in the early 1900s all conspire to fuel old B'rer's imagination.

Could this be the grave of a former slave who, after emancipation, remained with the family of - if not her actual - former master?  These are cases you hear of, or read about, but never actually encounter.

Details are noted so that I can do the research and learn the history.

(Intermission: Let's all go to the lobby and get ourselves a snack)

A few days and a LOT of research later, I have my answer. Sort of.

There is absolutely noting 100% solid on her on-line. What there is indicates that she was probably born in the early 1800s and died around 1900, was married and had children and grandchildren. And being white was not a slave (though even that is not a guarantee - white slaves were exceedingly rare but did exist).

I shall probably never know how a Twitty came to be in a Smith family cemetery.

Looks like I shall have to learn to live with being disappointed.