I love old family cemeteries. Just got back from spraying some roundup around my fraternal grandparents' graves in a very old cemetery in N. Wake Co. There are a lot of family cemeteries in N. Wake Co. if you know where to look; I have family in many of them. Periodically I'll take my daughter by the sites so she can pay her respects and get acquainted with some of her ancestors. This doesn't really excite her now, but later on she'll appreciate it a little more. I hate to see family plots that have been neglected and over-grown with weeds. Does anyone else have any family cemetery stories?
i have literally hundreds of family in many little farm cemeteries in wake harnett franklin granville and durham counties. when i started off wanting to do some genealogy (i'm a 7th generation local), i figured there'd be a big master list downtown at the archives so i went...but there wasn't. there is a project, though, last undertaken as part of the WPA and most recently started again in like 1980, called the nc cemetery survey. i was already a frequenter of woods and knew where a whole slew of small plots were, and so i started to contribute. i have catalogued dozens of them, literally 5000+ names and dates, and have contributed them over the last 10 or 12 years. thanks to that work, which was in part admittedly selfish, i was asked to be on a citizen's comission with the DOT to set policy on how the state deals with cemeteries in the planned paths of roadways, including digging them up and moving them and communicating with descendants, etc... included in my searches/restorations are a small 20 or so grave plot out in rtp/lowe's grove that contains my grandmother's grandparents, and her fraternal great grandfather, a confederate veteran. the plot was behind an old family house which was torn down years ago, and the cousin who tended it had died in the 60's. i hacked my way through 30 years of woods to find the thing, cleaned it up, and took my 80 year old grandmother to see the graves of her grandparents for the first time in over 40 years....i continued to maintain it myself even though it was in the middle of the woods behind an office building for about 10 years. something else has since been built there, and the property owners have treated it with great respect, even going so far as to pay for a black wrought iron fence to surround it. also, thanks to some columbo-like detective work, found a small plot in harnett county along hector's creek (fuquay springs) that is still in the middle of a big farm field, which contained my maternal grandfather's parents and grandparents among others, one of whom was a confederate veteran. the government will provide a free gravestone to any us veteran since the founding of the country so long as you can prove the site. well buddy, i did. and had a big ceremony at the site with a couple dozen family members to place the stone and we all sang dixie... i got more, but that's plenty
That is fantastic!! We go back that far in VA, it is so interesting to visit the family cemetaries. DH and I were married in a church where the land was donated by a family member over 100 years ago. We have ties to NC too, apparently some ancestors belonged to the Morovian church around the Winston Salem area and I'd love to learn more about that. They've traced us back to the late 1600's so far, most of them in VA. Fascinating! I've got a geneology thing here at the house that some cousins have been working on for 20 years.
No offense Kent, but :ack: I'm going to be cremated. ALL of my family members have been buried and NO ONE goes to see them. anyway..... there are several that I pass every day and it bothers me that not a single family member is there, maybe they go on Sundays? :?
I'm with you on this one. Don't want my family to feel obligated to visit a gravesite. I want to be scattered all over from the top of Rough Ridge on the Blue Ridge Parkway on a beautiful October day.
I think there is one right next to the car wash at the corner of cleveland school road and rte 42. Between the car was and used car wash. Over grown.
Honestly when I die I really won't care where I'm buried :mrgreen: but I'm mean so nothing is going to happen to me any time soon. :lol:
if your roots are in nc, you're in luck in that the state archives is in downtown raleigh. there are sometimes some records that are kept in the counties, but most are in the archives.... you should pursue that so you can get an old family recipe for moravian cookies
dangerboy: good post. Glad you took the time to look after that family plot in the woods. Many plots have probably been "lost" over the years as subdivisions were developed. I did a book on everyone buried in our church cemetery. Got death certificates on all I could find, pics, obit info with family info, etc. Turned out nice. Great reference book for folks up my way. There was a woman in Cary, Irene Kittinger, I think, who was heading up a group to document all of the grave sites in Wake Co. This was years ago. I know she and her volunteers collected a ton of info, but as far as I know, there's never been anything published. I don't know why it's taking so long. Publish what you have and go from there. harleygirl: no offense taken on your choice of cremation. We've got 1 urn buried in our church cemetery. I had a buddy in Basic Law Enforcement Training, a park ranger, who said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes loaded in some shotgun shells and shot out on the first day of duck season. kdc: Got my mother's side of the family traced back to N. Va, too. One relative living next to G. Washington and was an officer in Continental Army. Haven't made the connection across the pond, yet. Genealogy research comes and goes and I don't have a lot of time now to do a lot of digging.
Interesting thread...... I am from another part of NC and just the other week I made a comment to my wife about these roadside cemeteries. Perhaps I just never noticed them back home but they seem more prevalent in eastern NC. I travel all over eastern NC and notice them more and more now. Kudos to dangerboy for his efforts.
i bet the book was a fun experience. i almost wish i'd collected narratives and pictures of all the cemeteries i've been in... irene kittenger's book was to be about the olive family. i have a connection to them via my lowe's grove people, and helped her with some of the info. i was one of the main people irene kittenger called to chase down leads for several years, but i haven't heard from her in at least 5 years. one of the last ones she alreted me to was a small plot at the t-bone intersection of rand and ten-ten. there's a neighborhood there now, and hidden at the entrance surrounded by bushes is a plot with around 30 graves. i went to county commissioners meetings to speak against moving them (the builder had a plan to move them a mile or two away so he could build one more house), and the location was ordered to remain intact. they laid all the stones down flat, which i think is wrong, but they were allowed to do it. you can actually find tons of little plots like those at the entrances to neighborhoods. sometimes behind the bushes on the corner, sometimes inside the bushes surrounding the median at the entrance... oh, and wulfpak...of course you know about the cemetery in the parking lot at carter-finley, right? it's huge....
well people do step off into the patch of woods it's in to relieve themselves. maybe they should stop ****ing on graves in their own parking lot...
Between McGees Xroads and Benson, on Wisteria Lane, there is an old slave cemetery. Used to pass it all the time when I was horseback riding.
This wasn't a family cemetery but when I was a kid our Boy Scout Troop had a project to clean up an old cemetery. It was off a dirt road and it was so overgrown that most of us didn't know it was there. We found that the headstones were from the Revolutionary War period. Several were veterans. It made what started out as grunt work turn in to more of a treasure hunt looking for the oldest stone. As a teenager I did caretaker work at another cemetery near that one. This one was more modern. The earliest grave was in the 1820's and the most current is my Dad who was buried there 2 years ago. We would mow it and keep it nice but we also did burials. Back then the graves were dug with a backhoe but we filled them in by hand. I remember the first one I did, I was about 14 years old. It was an elderly lady that I didn't know and I was sort of nervous. The old man that I worked for told me to think of it as though I am the last person that gets to do something for her. That was the best advice ever. It made every one I did after that much easier including friends and family. Even one friend who killed himself. These days, once the vault is closed they just dump the dirt in from a truck. When Dad was buried they let me put the first few shovels on by hand. It was the last thing I did for him.
