I enter data and photographs from all my canvasses of cemeteries at a website called Find a Grave, so I won't store
that data here. FAG is an incredibly useful site, and I've found death dates and places of burial for a number of my ancestors there.
Every record in the database has been entered by a volunteer. There is no charge to search, and no charge to
create a user account and contribute to the database yourself.
You should know before using FAG that the photos on the records are protected by copyright. Not everyone feels the same
way I do about sharing photos of gravestones with the descendants of the deceased. Discussions about freely sharing photos of
gravestones have gotten very heated at times on the FAG message boards, generating what I personally feel is an unseemly debate
among people who claim to want to help others "find" the graves of their ancestors. As a result, I revised my own profile to
say that no one has to ask my permission before saving one of my photos to their own computer. If you see a photo of
one of your ancestors' graves that was taken by me, please feel free to snag it.
The link to my FAG profile is here.
I was a graver long before I started working on my family genealogy. I've taken hundreds of photos of gravestones,
which I consider a form of art. The stones have stories to tell, and occasionally, I'll see one that really makes me
curious.
Like this one, the husband and wife who died on the same day.
Or the brother and sister who died within one day of each other. Were they just as close in life?
The road is Arkansas State Highway 5 in Saline County, also known to the locals as Stagecoach Road. Yes, the stages used to travel it regularly.
And that was about the time that Paisley and Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (nee Allen) emigrated to Arkansas from North Carolina,
with their children, Sarah, Hannah, Lemuel, Isabell and Joseph. They farmed their property with frontage on the stagecoach road, and
it wasn't long until they had to decide where they would locate their family cemetery. Paisley Kirkpatrick died on 17 Aug 1852.
He was a few months shy of 44 years old. Paisley's youngest daughter, Elizabeth Catherine Kirkpatrick, was born later that year in October,
a little over two months after her father's death.
In what might seem a cruel twist of fate, daughter Hannah was next to die on 7 Jul 1860, leaving her husband, Ambrose Thompson,
a widower and her four year old daughter, Serepta, motherless. The 1860 census taker arrived on the date of Hannah's death.
Hannah's little sister followed her in death just ten days later.
Elizabeth (Allen) Kirkpatrick married again, to John Medlock, in 1861. Any happiness she may have found was short-lived.
She died on 29 Jul 1862, and joined the remainder of her family, buried in the graves on the side of the road.