Published: December 25, 2007 11:22 pm            

Unveiling their past

Information sought about unmarked graves in Greenup

GREENUP — When he’s on the hunt, Elwood Tackett looks for flat areas on hillsides decorated with cedar trees and Easter lilies — things people planted years ago to mark family graves.

Since Tackett, chairman of the Greenup County Cemetery Preservation Board, started counting tombstones about four years ago. He has helped the Greenup County Genealogy & Historical Society archive about 35,000 names in more than 600 Greenup County cemeteries.

Some of the cemeteries have historical markers from the 1700s and 1800s. Tall stone markers in the Shreve Cemetery on the Wurtland riverbank, thought by genealogist Kathleen Virgin Kenney to have at one time been mounted with lights to alert riverboat traffic, describe life far removed from modern times. Every family member buried there died within a 14-year time frame, Kenney said.

John William Boyce, who died in 1837, is memorialized by the words, “He early sought and found the pearl of great price.” Leven Shreve Boyce, a 4-year-old who died in 1829, has the description “He knew but little and suffered little.”

The cemetery preservation effort began in an attempt to identify cemetery locations and has since expanded to include a database searchable by surname, birth date, military status and other criteria. Group members spent almost a year indexing 1930 census data and spent tedious hours recording data from each cemetery.

The society is currently rechecking collected data and categorizing information found at newly-located cemeteries. The group wants to “GPs” all cemeteries, but the process will take time and money.

“This information needs to be preserved,” Tackett said. “We don’t have a great number of cemeteries, but we have had a few of them destroyed and the information went with them.”

Most of the county’s old cemeteries are on private property and, over the years, the cemeteries have been damaged by grazing livestock, floods and farmers or contractors who dozed away tombstones to make room for farmland or construction, Tackett said.

In May, the Greenup County Fiscal Court had the first reading of an ordinance requiring property owners to keep livestock from damaging cemeteries, but in June, fiscal court members ditched the effort because area farmers protested the cemetery protection measure.

Tackett and other volunteers and genealogists, with the help of inmates in Greenup County’s work release program, have cleaned up dozens of cemeteries that, for years, sat under brush, unnoticed and forgotten. The group also provides free labor to homeowners who purchase fencing materials to protect cemeteries on their properties.

Since the cemetery preservation project began, 15 endangered cemeteries, left unmaintained on Greenup County hillsides after families moved away, have been refurbished, Tackett said. However, there are many graves not accounted for in the county.

Members are now requesting help in finding information about those buried in unmarked Greenup County graves.

Last month, Tackett found two cemeteries that sat unnoticed and unmaintained for years. At one of the sites, the Warnock No. 3 cemetery in Beechy, Tackett said one stone dated back to 1799 and several others dated back to the 1800s. Of 30 graves at one of the newly-found cemeteries, Tackett said 15 were unmarked field stone’s and/or sunken graves.

Officials can’t estimate the exact number of unmarked graves in the county, but they do have ways of finding information about ancestors without tombstones.

Genealogy society members search old death certificates, funeral home records, Bible records, newspapers and other documents to determine where people have been buried. Volunteer Carl Barker researches obituary notices. Using these methods, the genealogists recently found eight infants born to the same family who were buried in the same Greenup County cemetery plot.

To start the unmarked graves initiative, Greenup County Public Library aide Carolyn Sue Pennington is heading the effort to locate information about her ancestors who are buried at the Heaberlin Cemetery in Wurtland.

Looking at an old family photo her grandmother gave to her years ago, she points to her grandmother, grandfather and dozens of other relatives.

“That’s Thomas, and there’s Alice,” she said. “And there’s Jacob and Jasper, Oscar, Charlie, Daisy, Sally, Mae and there’s Maxie right there.”

She spends between 20 and 25 hours on the project each week. Pennington said she wishes she started researching years ago so she could have talked to some of her older relatives.

Pennington obtained some information about her relatives from the Greenup County Genealogy & Historical Society’s genealogy CD, a CD that can be purchased at the Greenup County Public Library, but she is still looking for pictures, death certificates, obituaries or other information about the following family members: Everett Ashley, Ranson Blevins, Clarence Edward Burkhardt, Carmel Infant, Joan Francis Crum, Eric Stephen Crump, Virgie Merle Eary, Baby Boy Enyart, Virginia Spradlin Foster, Lillian Griffith, Frank Grubb, William Grubb, Betty Boggs Harvell, Bettie Birch Heaberlin, Esa Heaberlin, Ocie Meadows Heaberlin, Ralph E. Heaberlin, Dennis Jordan, Nancy Jane Jordan, Kellum Infant, Alta Kilgore, Jewell Evelyn Kilgore, Wilford Clancy Kilgore, William Earl Kilgore, Elma Boggs Lemaster, Henry Horce Martin, Infant May, girl, Sarah Robinson McAllister, Joseph Russell Mowery, James McGowan, Infant daughter of William Morris, Anna Enyart Mowery, Matilda Ocerman, William Ocerman, Kate Rice Ralls, Grace Smith, Elliott Spradlin, Infant Sturgill, girl, Beecher Sturgill.

Information about these Greenup County ancestors can be sent to grannynun@hotmail.com or by calling Pennington at the Greenup County Library at (606) 473-6514.

The Greenup County Genealogy & Historical Society meets at 6 p.m. on the second Friday of every month at the Greenup County Library on Main Street in Greenup. They also have weekly work sessions, beginning at 4 p.m., on Wednesdays and offer to help anyone research family histories.

MARY MUSIC can be reached at mmusic@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2657.

        

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