Smith's Cemetery

So about a year ago we were searching hard for a Smith's Cemetery in Fayette County. Sherry had found a record that her grandmother had a baby that died young and was buried in a Smith Cemetery in Oak Hill.

Finding Smith's

We found a death certificate that mentioned a burial in Smith Cem in Oak Hill. Tyree Funeral Home was listed as the Undertaker. They are still in business, so we called their Oak Hill office and asked about the cemetery. They gave us directions that were to go to Greentown Road, go around the big curve and find a house on the left at the top of a hill.

We drove out Greentown Road and didn't see it on the first pass, so we stopped and asked a family that was working in the yard. They said we had to go back down the road to the nice brick house, now on the right side, and the cemetery was up on the hill above the house. We still weren't quite sure where it was but we spotted it after we passed and just had to turn around and come back.

This seems to be the way we find cemeteries. We get a rough idea of where it is and what we're looking for, go to the area and have to ask for help. So far we've always found helpful people - Sherry is excellent at spotting the perfect person to help with directions.

Mapping and Photos

We found a small-ish cemetery with about 50 interments, spread out over the top of a hill, with a big oak tree in the middle. The oldest graves seemed to be closest to the house, on the east side of the hill. Then there were a bunch of graves in the middle near the tree, and a few along the treeline to the west and north. We noticed that there were a couple different family names (Smith, Olds, Evans, Hamilton, Newton, Plumley, Painter), and five or six military graves.

We knew the cemetery probably wasn't in Find-A-Grave at all, so we photographed every grave we could find. We were mostly looking for a baby's grave from 1939, and we didn't find anything marked that way. We did find a couple graves near the tree that weren't marked and seemed to be for infants, so we think that our Phillis has a home here.

It was a beautiful fall day and the leaves were starting to change. Sherry found an old wood pile, and what looked like the old sign for the cemetery lying there, so we set it up and took a picture.

Research

Some of the names interested me - Odgen instead of Ogden, Myrtha, Nellie Painter. I decided to put them in a separate Ancestry tree while Sherry was working on her own family.

These are some of the relationships we found between the families:

• Hazel Plumley married Lana Smith in 1925.
• John Wise Olds married Rosa Zetta Smith in 
• Lottie Ann Elsie Evans married Jess Willard Olds in 1950.
• Dolly Mattie Evans  married George F. Olds in 1950. Dolly & Lottie were sisters and Jess and George were brothers.
• Harmon Smith married Verlina Hamilton, daughter of Samuel and Luella, in 1931.
• A family of Painters lived next door to Harmon Smith's family 

Of course it turned out that Harmon Smith is in Sherry's family tree.

Links

http://www.findagrave.com/ (Smith's Cemetery)

http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/62552020/