Corley-Poe Cemetery

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Find-A-Grave

After an almost ten-year hiatus, Sherry and I decided to try fulfilling some local Find-A-Grave (FG) photo requests. We had moved to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia several years ago, and had not done much with FG since the move.

The Flint Hill area looked interesting, so we focused our efforts there. One cemetery, with 7 requests outstanding, was Corley-Poe.  Using the FG mobile app, it shows up at the center of town, next to the fire station. There's a nice county fair (or some kind of fair) setup there, but no cemetery. So on our first trip we went to the Flint Hill Methodist Cemetery, behind the Flint Hill UMC, and also right in the middle of town. There were two outstanding requests there, and fortunately we found both markers pretty easily. The cemetery is well-kept and was recently mowed.

Further investigation of Corley-Poe showed that FG did not have GPS information. Since the location was "Flint Hill", the app just picked the geographical center of Flint Hill, or something like that. There were 17 memorials attributed to the cemetery in FG, only two had photos, and there were no cemetery photos.  The two photos available did not have any GPS tagging.

Our next step at this point is a Google search, but that didn't yield anything for Corley-Poe except links back to FG.

Ancestry

Sometimes it is helpful to "visualize" the FG information and try to sort out family connections in Ancestry. So we setup a Corley-Poe tree, based around John Madison Poe. We quickly found a marriage record for his marriage to his first wife, Elizabeth Jane Corley, and then a whole bunch of hints popped up from other Ancestry contributors.

This gave us a couple of photos of the graveyard, including one that showed the RHS marker shown below.

Rappahannock Historical Society

The RHS has a website, with posted office hours and a physical location in Washington, Virginia (the county seat). They look to have some very good family history resources. And they have a link for a Cemetery Project, but the link is invalid.

After much more Google searching, Sherry found a document and sent it to me. I opened it up and searched for Corley and Poe with no luck, and left it at that. After a couple more days, I did a search for "Rappahannock Cemeteries" which led to a page on the Rappahannock County site: https://www.rappahannockcountyva.gov/news_detail_T31_R233.php, offering a compilation of historic properties.  Following the link gives the same document Sherry sent me, so I had another look. Turns out it is scanned but not OCR'd (converted to text) so searching the text doesn't work. So I read through all the Homes With Known Cemeteries, the Churches, and the Public and Affiliated Cemeteries without luck. But shortly into the Other Cemeteries, I struck gold. Or at least a postal address.  22 Old Vineyard Lane, Flint Hill.

Corley-Poe Cemetery

Once we saw the RHS marker and a couple other photos from Ancestry, we had done a lot of driving around Flint Hill, looking for a nice stone fence with a small gate. Flint Hill has a LOT of stone fences. With an actual address, we went back, knowing we were likely the cemetery was on private property and we would have to get permission from the landowner.

When we arrived at the address, we were greeted by three friendly dogs, coming straight up to the car. I got out and let them sniff, and the homeowner came out and greeted us. I explained that we were looking for the cemetery, and introduced us, and they gave us permission to visit the cemetery.

We had a great time nosing around, taking pictures, and even signing the guestbook. At the entrance, there's a stone pillar with a Pelican case hanging from it, nicely labeled "Poe-Corley Cemetery Visitors". The case contains a couple guestbooks and pens, well padded and secure against the weather.

The burials here are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the latest one around 1933. All the grave markers are hand-carved field stones, so much of the carved information has worn away. But we were able to get enough off four of the markers to match them up with FG burial records, and fulfill two photo requests!