Why Didn't You Tell Me?

Many ages ago, when this planet was not quite so ancient.....

I believe I stole that line from the Rakin-Bass animated production of The Hobbit.

It is, perhaps, the perfect lead-in to this little cemetery. And I do mean little. Five marked graves and maybe one with two infants. Maybe.

YACBITW. Yet Another Cemetery Back In The Woods.

As we approached the cemetery location, things started getting familiar. Very, very familiar. Eerily familiar. 

Sone-of-a!!!! I've been here A LOT. This is next to the house of a long time friend (well, friend's parents to be precise). We played hours upon hours of D&D and other games here. And she was married in the front yard (where did the gazebo go?!). This was our gaming hangout for literally YEARS. Yet never once did she mention the graves virtually in the front yard!

I'm gonna have to have a lonnnnng talk with that girl.

Sadly, like so many other century plus old cemeteries in these areas, this one is in bad shape. Two once lovely markers have fallen (been pushed?) over.

For Obvious Reasons

 I often remark about unknown and unknowable stories evoked by visiting this cemetery or that. Usually these questions can never be answered. Those who could answer them did not record the stories nor pass them on. 

Secrets literally taken to the grave.

Then there are cases where the answers are not too difficult to discern. And are poignant. Oh, so poignant. This is one of those cases.

Alone in a wooded area bounded on one side by a field through which electric transmission lines run and on the other side by industrial buildings rest two graves. That of a young mother - some 27 years old - and her only child - a son - who died before reaching age 7. No family near by. Neither parents nor siblings. If there are any other graves nearby they are unmarked and invisible.

Being too lazy and forgetful to take my own photos I stole these from Find A Grave.

All her family rest in graveyards and cemeteries some miles away. Her husband appears to vanish from the record. He does not show in subsequent Censuses and no one has recorded a memorial for him. 

So we have an obvious answer to the question of how these graves came to be all but forgotten. There are no descendants to tend them. Indeed, there appear to be no relatives of any kind. She was an only child based on what can be found in the records today. So the nearest possible surviving relative would have to be a 1st cousin. Or someone as or more distant. And how many people tend the graves of distant cousins?

Any life that ends at a young age is sad enough. And any parent who outlives their child is even more tragic whatever age it may be. Indeed, even someone over 100 years old experiencing the death of their 80 something year old child remains tragic despite the child having lived a long life.

So Harriet losing her only son at age 6 had to be heartbreaking. At least it was a pain she did not have to long endure as she passed almost exactly two months after him. Doubtless, though, those two months must have felt to her as an eternity.

Which brings us back full circle to unanswerable questions. Did she die by accident? Illness? Or did she surrender to something that she could have otherwise survived because having lost Henry she also lost her will to live?

Grove? Yes. Pleasant? Welllllll........

 The Grove may have been pleasant once upon a time, many years ago. Today? Not so much. Between the electric sub-station on one side and the mound of illegally dumped mattresses on the other, and with the plethora of briars, brush, and ivy everywhere, pleasant is not really the term I would apply today. 

Mattresses? Yup. No less than a half dozen. Probably more. I did not make the effort to gather a complete count. With 126 listed memorials in Find A Grave just getting a solid audit completed will prove to be enough of a task. Enough that we could not complete it (this being the end of a day of stomping through several cemeteries across a wide area). There are several that we either missed, could not find, of the update did not succeed. 

That is not to say we did not make a valiant effort! Indeed, we found a couple of previously missed memorials (one being only a partial stone with hand lettering on it). One challenge was locating a child who passed just prior to her 3rd birthday. A note for little Ozella (now THERE is a name!) stated, "Back left corner of cemetery with headstone sunk into the earth hiding the death date." The problem being determining the cemetery orientation! What is the front and what is the back? 

The headstones are oriented in the traditional East-West line for Christian beliefs and access today is from the Southern facing side. But looking carefully there are the remains of what looks like a roadbed running SSE to NNW along the Western facing side. I take that to be the original access thus making the West face the 'front' and slink off into the brush into the NE corner of the area. That is where I find the partial marker and pause to log it before resuming the search for Ozella's stone. I finally find it far removed from all the others. It is almost as though she was buried *outside* the cemetery. There certainly are not any obvious graves next to her. Even the partial stone I found is several feet removed from her grave. The area is far too overgrown to make a real assessment. Nor does there appear to be any records of the cemetery readily available. I suppose one could check property records and funeral home records to glean ideas about it. But as the meme today goes, "Ain't nobody got time for that!" Especially when there is no relationship to anyone in the cemetery.

Careful review shows one individual with two memorials! Yup. Submitted to be merged.

Further review raises two questionable memorials for deaths decades after the last clear burial in the cemetery. One in 1999 and one in 2000. A check reveals that these are actually in Pleasant Grove Baptist Church elsewhere in the county. Yes, those are duplicated there and yes, merges have been submitted.

These still leave nagging questions. The last actual burials too place in the later half of 1979. The last prior to those were single burials in 1967 then 1965. It is only when we go back to the 1950s that we see any kind of regular activity in the cemetery. What condition was the cemetery in in the 1970s? Was there any question about burying anyone in it?

I can understand why these last two people would desire to be interred here. One is with his wife and daughter, both of whom he lost in the 1930s. He rejoined them after 45 years. 

The other has parents and siblings here. I cannot determine if he ever married and had children. 

I wonder if anyone knows when a burial is the last that will ever take place in a cemetery. When this last burial for John Clayborn Snead (interestingly his draft card give his name as John Clayton Snead) was last to rest in October of 1979 was it clear that he would likely be the last burial here? What did the cemetery look like? 

I know from personal recollection that the area has changed dramatically since then. Both the blessing and curse of being an old fart.

I Have Been Misinformed

 Misinformed, hell! I done been lied to!

Picking cemeteries to audit is basically an exercise in triage. Locating them is only one part. Looking at location, access, and number of memorials all must be factored in. For example: There are two cemeteries within walking distance from Br'er's warren. However! One of them is a large, modern, commercial cemetery with thousands of graves. The other is relatively smaller with a few hundred graves. Neither is one that could be audited in a short period. But the latter could be done over the course of a long day or two. The former would take several weeks to audit. So if picking one or the other for an afternoon excursion, obviously the latter would win out.

Picking places for area audits generally means restricting the candidates to those with fewer than about 150 memorials. Usually the focus is on those the handfuls instead. And among those there are many that simply cannot be accessed. At least not without permission of property owners. Fenced yards and close quarters houses make access nigh on impossible.

Recently we set out to audit a cemetery with 4 memorials (only 1 of which had a grave photo in Find A Grave). Expectation was to find one or two markers in a small spot behind a church. 

That wasn't the reality.

Small cemetery? Yes. Four graves? Oh, hell no! There are closer to three score graves here! As the Marine nephew might put it, "Adjust fire!" Not doing a full audit here today. We have too many other places lined up to visit this day so a full audit will have to wait for another day.

I did update Find A Grave with a few memorials. Namely all the military markers, one of which appears to be a cenotaph for a WW I serviceman. I say appears. More research would be needed to confirm.

While all the memorials are not logged into Find A Grave, I did more than double the number in the system so honor has been satisfied.

"That's a Negative, Ghost Rider"

There are times when discretion is truly the order of the day. And today was that day!

Another day dodging rain and auditing small cemeteries in the counties surrounding Br'er's home warren. One of the planned visits was to what is labeled in Find A Grave as McAfee Road Cemetery located on, shockingly, McAfee Road! With a scant 5 listed memorials an audit should take mere minutes.

The operative word there being 'should'. 

A truism taught to all military leaders is put simply; No plan survives contact with the enemy. Boy-o does it apply to these graveyard excursions! And how!

These graves are located in a residential area. The only parking is on the street (unless one is willing to risk using some stranger's driveway). McAfee Road is a main thoroughfare for the area so parking on the curb there is absolutely out of the question. There are side streets before and after the cemetery location, but these are, how shall I put it, not somewhere I would choose to leave a vehicle unattended. So the plan morphs into Mrs. Br'er staying with the car and circling the block while Old Br'er himself dashes over to execute the quick audit. 

That *was* the plan. What I found changed all that. Hell, it resulted in aborting the mission!

Unless I was willing to spend an hour or five clearing ivy no audit was happening. The entire area had been completely covered with a thick layer of English Ivy since someone had last updated Find A Grave with photos of the graves. Just for reference, these are those pictures stolen taken borrowed from Find A Grave.

Even in these one can see the ivy creeping in to take over.

It is worth sharing, too, what I encountered when I reached the site. This is the view from the sidewalk looking in at the area the graves are.

What especially saddens me is that I believe there are a couple of unrecorded graves here. If you enlarge this photo and look just to the right of base of the ivy covered tree, you will spot some telltale grey. This looked at the moment like a couple of  False Tomb graves. None of the listed memorials in Find A Grave show a False Tomb marker. So if that is what these are then there are unlisted graves on the site.

I hate that it was simply too unsafe to spend any time here. Perhaps one day if I can recruit a few folks to join in (there being safety in numbers) we can revisit, execute the audit, and determine for certain if these are graves or not.

All But Forgotten

 I have often commented on how the graves of children - and especially infants - are arguably the saddest to encounter. A life cut so short and the grief of new or nearly parents is tragic.

But I think I need to amend that sentiment.

As tragic as the death of any child is, finding a child's grave that has clearly been lost, overlooked, and neglected, and which you cannot even link to a family, is more tragic still. I encountered just this case recently.

We had set out to visit some nearby family cemeteries (no relations - just an excuse to tramp about in a cemetery). These were pretty much in residential areas and each had only a handful of memorials in it.

Whaley Cemetery turned out to be in a small neighborhood, sitting in a small plot adjacent to a home, and on the 'corner' of a cul-de-sac entry. With three recorded memorials, taking a couple of minutes to GPS tag each was a moral imperative. 

But there were more than three graves. Several are totally unmarked save perhaps a field stone. But two were not. One was only a footstone with initials which I logged anyway. 

Then there was Lora's small headstone. 13 months 2 weeks old. Tragic. But even more touching is that there is no obvious connection between Joel Whaley (the progenitor in this cemetery) and a Wood family. Who were this child's parents? How did she come to be here? And more maddening, why was her grave overlooked or ignored when this cemetery was created in Find A Grave? The entire cemetery isn't much larger than a two car garage. And her headstone is mere feet from the large Whaley stone. How and why was she ignored?

Addendum: I spent some time trying to suss out who this child's parents might be based on Census records. Sadly I cannot place a Wood family anywhere near the Whaley family in either the 1870 or the 1880 Census. And there is nothing about little Lora in any on-line reference.

Pounds Cemetery

 Where is the most obvious place to find a family cemetery? Why in an industrial park, naturally. In this case Old Br'er himself actually earned his carrots working in one of the nearby buildings. Yet he never so much as heard about this place in all those years.

One look and you would naturally know this leads to an old cemetery. Duh!

One of those little details that haunt me. Note the furthest "table" grave cover. It does not actually have the slab visible, only the 'legs'. Were you standing there and looking down you would see a slab at the base, flat on the ground. None of the other versions have a slab at ground level, only atop the legs. Now look closer. All the legs for all the memorials tape up from the ground. Rather like obelisks with the tops cut off. 

Now. Either that last grave is missing the top (by design or destruction) OR it is upside down (which would have taken more than a little effort!). If the former, why did it get two slabs and the others only one? If the latter, why are the legs reversed?

The stone walls are for False Tombs. On the left is a probable single grave, though it is large enough to perhaps be two. On the right is an obvious triple grave, and possibly a quadruple. Alas, none of these have anything indicating a name. One could speculate on who is where based on identified graves adjoining them and the dates for persons recorded as being buried in the cemetery. These False Tombs - especially this style - is rather common in the Southern US for periods in the 19th Century. But it would remain only speculation.

What was particularly unusual about this cemetery is that there is a recent interment. A mere five years ago. Prior to that the last recorded burial was in 1905! 105 years 9 months later to be precise! A little digging shows this last burial to be the 3rd Great-grandson of the patriarch of this family. His 2nd GGF is buried here as well. 

It is worth noting that this 2015 date is most probably for cremains. There is no indication of an actual grave being dug, and there is a stone border in place that is fare too small to be a full grave. This would also make sense as getting equipment in to excavate a grave would be nigh on impossible for the site. 

And I don't think anyone would be carrying a casket and vault in by hand, either! Just getting the headstone in place had to be a serious effort.

I've heard of "pouring one out" for a fallen comrade. But I can't recall finding entire beers being left before. I would have thought James warranted better than Miller, though.