Tombstone Tuesday - Kelly Family Cemetery

Tombstone Tuesday is a daily blogging prompt used by many genealogy bloggers to help them post content on their sites. To participate in Tombstone Tuesday simply create a post which includes an image of a gravestone of one or more ancestors and it may also include a brief description of the image or the ancestor. Here is my submission:

I heard about the Kelly Family Cemetery but could find no directions. It's one of those small cemeteries lost in the woods of somebody's private property. Fortunately, Richard Kelly saw my blog and contacted me and gave me directions on how to get to the small cemetery. It is on someone's private hunting land so I don't recommend you going there. It's fairly isolated. But I do want to give the GPS coordinates so this family cemetery won't be totally lost and forgotten. Take Hwy 9 to Kelly Town (it's also known as Kelton or Kelly community) where the Kelly One Stop convenience store is. Pass the convenience store and turn left on Pea Ridge Rd. Pass Foster's Chapel church and then turn left on Eisontown Rd. Look for Hart Rd on the left. Just past Hart Rd look for an old dirt road on the left. It has a gate. You follow the dirt road and keep looking into the woods on the left to find the cemetery. The GPS coordinates to the dirt road are 34 50.447' and -81 35.788. There are 6 head stones and most of those are barely legible. I used chalk to highlight them and you can see the before and after photos. There are a good many rocks marking graves and I suppose we will never know who they represent, whether family or slaves. We've been twice now. Once in the summer when we found it. But we came back this Fall after the leaves had fallen so we could better see the lay of the land and to clean up. There were some seedlings coming up on the graves so we brought some nippers to nip them down. We don't want trees growing up and toppling the stones and losing the grave spots. So we nipped around Elizabeth and J.G. Kelly and Thomas Kelly's graves. We didn't want to do too much since it's private land. By the way, it's best to ask permission from the owner whenever you go cemetery hunting on private land and use good manners. Don't leave trash, don't root around outside of the actual graves or build fences, be aware of hunters, etc. It is someone else's property.

The oldest tombstone is this one for Thomas Kelly.