Genealogical Research

A few years ago, I was visiting the graves of my Grandfather Ledford’s first wife and third child at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Macon County, North Carolina. The cemetery is a large one, old and beautiful and rather peaceful in spite of its location in the midst of a crowded rural neighborhood. I parked my car across from the church, paid my respects at the grave of a woman I had never met, and turned around to find an astonishing site:

Apparently, the church decided to expand, and the only place left for them to do so was into the cemetery itself. No graves were disturbed (that I could tell), but workers cut awfully close to some of the graves. You can see this from the section of red clay mud running along the road, with the footstones of four graves (and the end of one grave without a footstone) right on the edge of the front part of that earthen wall, and two graves cut off along the side where the new construction is.

Now, I’m not one to put the interests of the living over those of the dead. That being said, isn’t there such a thing as respect, and especially for your own ancestors? I know the workers who were building the new extension and road were being careful, but did they not realize that tombstones may not mark the exact boundaries of graves, especially for those who died decades ago when stones were not necessarily placed at or near the time of death?

I will admit that I haven’t been back since taking that picture. I have faith that the church put up a retaining wall of some sort to protect both the graves and the marking stones once the new building was completed.

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