FAMILY HELPS SEARCH FOR GRAVEYARDS  by Liz Carey
From Independent Mail  Saturday, July 10, 2010

Under her feet, dried leaves crackle as brambles tug Susan Gabbard's jeans.  
Despite the 100-degree heat, she and her family comb through the woods between
Lewis Street and New Pond Road in Anderson.

"Mom, come this way," her daughter Elizabeth Gabbard yells from behind a wall of 
trees.  For more than 50 feet there is nothing but thick forest.  "There are 
rocks here about every six feet."

For more than an hour, they walk through brambles and over fallen logs, looking
for headstones.  Gabbard is looking for a graveyard.  Gabbard volunteers for
findagrave.com.  Recently, she received a request for a picture of a headstone, 
she said.

"They called it Slabtown Memorial Cemetery, but they had the wrong name," she 
said.  "But they had the GPS coordinates, so we got the address from the e911 
system in the county."

In the area behind Lewis Street, the group finds a crumbling concrete roadway, 
as well as an old still.  In one area, someone has erected a tent.  An old dirt
road winds through the area leading to beer bottles and tattered clothing that 
litter the ground.

Through the underbrush, Gabbard finds stones, pieces of marble another 
indications there may have been a graveyard in the area, but it's hard to tell.

More than 45 graveyards are thought to exist in Anderson  County alone, but 
can't be found.  Paul Kankula, Anderson-Oconee-Pickens County GenWeb Project 
coordinator, said the reasons for abandoned cemeteries are many.  He and his 
partner, Gary Flynn, have put together an online directory of sorts of all the 
graveyards in South Carolina.

"Families die off or move and their property gets sold to a new landowner who 
(couldn't) care less about maintaining their cemetery," Kankula said.  "Kids 
don't want to live in Anderson, so they sell their parents' land when they die 
and move on.  Some can't pay their taxes, so their land gets sold to the highest 
bidder.  Some give their land to their church and move on to greener pastures.  
There are all sorts of reasons why...cemeteries become abandoned.  Until a few 
years ago, families could be kept from visiting family cemeteries on private 
land."

Kankula has horror stories surrounding abandoned cemeteries.  "One landowner 
told me that folks should not be concerned with preserving their past.  They 
should be concerned with their future and the coming of their Lord," Kankula 
said.  "That was a farmer who was allowing his livestock to desecrate a pioneer
cemetery.  They there was another farmer who was storing his hay in the 
cemetery's fenced-in area.  There are others who plant crops on top of them.  A 
furniture store in Pendleton put a parking lot on top of one.  So you'll never 
know how many undiscovered cemeteries there are."

In 2008, Sen. Larry Martin of Pickens helped pass legislation to prevent 
landlowners from denying access to cemeteries on their land.  The measure put
disputes into the hands of magistrates.

Martin said there were laws against desecrating a grave, but none that required 
landowners to maintain the grave sites or to record them.

Gabbard has a personal interest in helping others find the grave site of their 
ancestors.  Her great-great-grandfather's grave was in an abandoned cemetery in 
Hall County, Georgia.

"It took six people about six weeks to clean the cemetery up," she said.  "It 
tears me up to know a cemetery has been deserted and no one knows where it is."
For the last few years, Gabbard has been finding graves for people.  Two years 
ago, it was for her family.  After searching through church records, family 
histories and death records in Columbia, Gabbard found the grave site of her 
grandmother's twin sister.

Eight-month-old Sara Louise Cape, the twin sister of Gabbard's grandmother, Emma 
Jane Cape Jarrard, died of pneumonia in 1920.  She was buried under an oak tree 
behind Starr Memorial Baptist Church, Jarrard had told Gabbard.

After researching Cape's death and burial, Gabbard had a marker placed near the 
stump of where the tree had been.  She was fulfilling a promise to her 
grandmother.

"It's more than just a burial spot," she said.  "It's a place to honor them and 
to remember them.  When the cemeteries are abandoned, it doesn't mean those 
memories fade or are any less important."

Harley Feltman, cemetery chairman with the Anderson Genealogy Society, said 
current legislation authorizes counties and municipalities to "preserve and 
protect" cemeteries determined to be abandoned.  The legislation doesn't require 
them to do anything, though.

He has approached the county to help his organization at least identify the 
grave sites.

"We were going to get our people out there and do one or two a month and take a 
day and go out and clean it up where we could," Feltman said.  "If the county 
could just do the signage, we'll do the cleaning of the 10, and then we'll add 
10 more next year."

The gravesites are historic, he said.

"A lot of cemeteries do not have tombstones.  They have rocks, but the people 
are still buried there.  It's a place that should be honored," he said.  
"Cemeteries are a tremendous place for genealogy.  You can get the names, 
birth dates, their parents, their children.  There are patriots buried in 
Anderson, from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War...it preserves their memory 
over the years, so they're not forgotten."

Geoff Cannada, GIS director for Anderson County, said the county has been 
working to map the missing graveyards identified by Kankula's list.  

"We have located more than 30 of them," Cannada said.  "Between either physical 
or site location or talking with landowners, we've been able to find them.  Some
of them are on the side of the road.  You just have to look for them."

Some of the graves he's found go back centuries, he said.

"Some of these are very, very old.  I've seen dates into the 1800s and back into 
the Civil War era...and who knows, some of them don't even have any markings," he 
said.  "As far as the physical conditions, it looks like some of them have been 
taken better care of than others.  Some of them you can still make out names and 
dates.  Some of them are nothing more than stones."

That's what makes Susan and Elizabeth Gabbard believe what they have found in 
the small forest is a grave site.

"Back in the 1800s, they didn't have headstones, they would just put down a 
rock," Elizabeth Gabbard said.

For Susan Gabbard, the search isn't over.
"We may have to wait until cooler weather when the leaves die back" she said.  
"Then we'll try again."