I was searching through Ancestry.com for an early relative and stumbled upon a link to this website…
…a site maintained by the National Park Service. After you get on this free information site, you can search for a relative that you know, or suspect, was in the Civil War to see their service record and even their cemetery site. Free info, in a world where documents and searches can be costly is a great thing.
Lesson learned: It pays to look more closely at some of your search info. The James Purdy noted on the research page is not the relative that I was looking for, but I clicked on the research page just for the heck of it, wondering if what I found was a relative of the original relative (it was not). When I read the source information, I saw a link to the park service page. In the future, I’ll look more closely at my sources.
I was out at an appointment today and took a back road toward home. In the corner of my eye I saw a tombstone. I had to find a place to turn around and encountered the saddest, most neglected place… A giant cemetery full of old grave markers and grass that was as high as my knees in some places. I’ve driven past this site a million times and never noticed it before. The genealogist (and history lover) in me finally made me take notice.
I took a video of the cemetery. It doesn’t look like much from the video, but deep in the grass are some small tombstones that have tipped over, and many low profile marks set low in the ground that you can’t see until you get close to them.
I walked through the high grass toward an obelisk style tombstone and found a couple that I could read.
Headstone – James and Margaret Jones
This smaller headstone was near the obelisk. I was unable to read it, but perhaps blowing it up here may help:
Unreadable "Jones" headstone
This granite stone was in the same corner as the Jones stones – it is fairing better than the older stones. Notice also the tiny discolored stone behind and to the left of it.
This stone reads, "Hannah Hues, 1840-1915, Isaac A Hues 1833-1907"
And finally, this small stone was buried under live and dead, dried out weeds. I had to push the weeds aside to photograph it.
Headstone reads, "Charles H. Hert, Jr, 1880-1952"
It was sad to see the state that this cemetery was in. Perhaps a visit to the historical society is in order. Before you can even begin to clean up a cemetery you need to find out who owns the land (there is no church nearby and no church sign) and get permission to clean it up.
