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!

Finding Life in a Cemetery

Sherry

While "working" a cemetery...digitizing headstones, uploading photo requests to Find-A-Grave. I find myself captivated by the life within the cemetery.  As David systematically digitizes headstones, I break off and begin photographing the beauty.

I explore the legends and spirituality behind the life I find in the cemetery.  Here are some of the photographs:

Bee Legend of the Appalachian Mountains

copyright, Slowmoto Graphics

In parts of the Appalachian mountains, there is a legend about bees surrounding a death in the family. Whenever someone dies, the family must whisper the information to the bees before the sunrise of the next day. The bees are the messengers of the gods and fly into the heavens and notify the Gods of the death.

If the family doesn't relay the information to the bees, the family living under the same roof of the deceased will perish.  In Ireland the folklore includes keeping the Gods informed of human events and inviting the bees to attend the funeral or turning the hives toward the path of the coffin's route. http://irishhedgerows.weebly.com

Tell the Bees

By Sarah Lindsay

Tell the bees. They require news of the house;

they must know, lest they sicken

from the gap between their ignorance and our grief.

Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch

to a stick and attach the stick to their hive.

From the fortress of casseroles and desserts

built in the kitchen these past few weeks

as though hunger were the enemy, remove

a slice of cake and lay it where they can

slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound.

copyright, Slowmoto Graphics

Butterfly Soul

In Ireland, there is a saying:  “Butterflies are souls of the dead waiting to pass through purgatory.” A butterfly begins its' life as a caterpillar then metamorphoses into a butterfly. The butterfly symbolizes resurrection and represents the soul leaving the body. https://mysendoff.com 

In Ancient Greek, the word butterfly is known as the psyche, which means soul.  The butterfly's soul is touched by divine love, but which, by reason of the mistakes made, must undergo some tribulations before having access to happy immortality. http://www.insects.org/

copyright, Slowmoto Graphics

Legend of the Butterfly

According to an American Indian Legend, if anyone desires a wish to come true they must first capture a butterfly and whisper that wish to it.  Since a butterfly can make no sound, the butterfly cannot reveal the wish to anyone but the Great Spirit who hears and sees all.
In gratitude for giving the beautiful butterfly its freedom, the Great Spirit always grants the wish. So, according to legend, by making a wish and giving the butterfly its freedom, the wish will be taken
to the heavens and be granted."  http://www.swallowtailfarms.com

I read many poems about butterflies and the afterlife before finding this poem:

  I AM NOT THERE

Do not stand by my grave and weep

For I am not there.

I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am diamonds that glint on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning hush

I am the swift uplifting rush of butterflies in joyous flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.

I am not there.  I did not die.

Author Unknown

Global Positioning

When Sherry and I decided to volunteer with Find-A-Grave to take pictures of gravestones, we felt that it was important that we have a record of the location where each picture was taken. Since digital cameras typically produce JPEG files, and the JPEG format can include header data with GPS location, we felt it was simplest to find a digital camera that included GPS that it would stamp onto each picture as it was taken.

It turns out this is called "GeoTagging" and is fairly common among a younger crowd. Younger than us, at least. At any rate, when we looked for GPS-enabled cameras last year, there were two kinds - GPS add-ons to expensive digital SLR cameras, and "tough" cameras. I found this whole new niche of digital cameras I didn't know existed - they are waterproof, shockproof, and geotag-ready. They even take pictures underwater!

So we got one, a Pentax model WG-3 GPS, which we've been very happy with. It takes a couple seconds from when you turn it on until it locates a GPS satellite and then every outdoor picture will be tagged. At home, I can examine the GPS tags and map where the grave location is on Google Maps.

Okay, now we know that GPS for cameras is probably only accurate to about ten feet. But even if the GPS gets you within 20 feet, it has really narrowed the area you have to search for a grave.

We leave the geotag information in the header when we upload the pictures to Find-A-Grave. On purpose.

Here's why.

I feel that the biggest next step for Find-A-Grave has to involve some kind of spatial proximity among graves. When we go to a cemetery to get genealogical information, one of the biggest ways to get information is to look at the graves around the one you already knew about. Maybe Uncle Joe is buried next to his parents. Or his children. Or the "significant other" he spent the last twenty years of his life with after his wife passed.

Find-A-Grave currently allows you to enter plot information. Sometimes this is useful, in larger, more organized, active cemeteries. For the smaller places Sherry and I frequent there isn't any plot information. Even in many of the larger cemeteries a plot number doesn't pinpoint the grave very well, unless you know all the intricacies of how to read the cemetery's cryptic markers.

Find-A-Grave also allows you to enter GPS coordinates for each memorial. This is done as an extra step. If it is a memorial you have created, you click "Add Plot" and enter the latitude and longitude from the photo, after extracting them and converting them to the right format. If the memorial was created by someone else, and you are just adding the photo, you have to send an edit request to the owner/creator of the memorial with the latitude and longitude. Probably if they notice that your name matches the photo, they will accept the edit without question. If they are still active in Find-A-Grave, of course.

Anyway, the point of the above rant is that it would be much simpler if Find-A-Grave decides to examine the GPS tags in the JPEG files themselves. They can automate the process of extracting the coordinates, converting them to the right format, and updating the location of the grave. And maybe by the time they get around to that, they will also address how to display grave positions so that their users can see what graves are nearby the grave of their loved one.

-- David, blogging from 39°08'40.4"N 77°24'45.0"W

Update, 17 Jan 2015

Find-A-Grave now has an "Upload and Transcribe" option in Beta form. You have to go to a link, http://www.findagrave.com/enable-beta, and then it shows a Transcriptions section on your member page, and on each cemetery page.

The idea is that you upload gravestone photos for a particular cemetery, and then you go in and transcribe the gravestone data directly into cemetery records. It's still Beta, so there's the occasional bug, but it seems very well done. You can enter one or more persons data for each stone, and if they already exist in the database it pulls up the existing entry. You have a week from when you upload the photos to transcribe them, and then they are released into a general pool where anyone can transcribe them.

As a side note - I've found that I still want to do a little pre-processing on the photos before I upload them. Usually I just crop the photo close to the stone, adjust the brightness/contrast, and compress.

All of that is fantastic on it's own, and a great improvement to the site. But in the spirit of this blog post, they actually pull the geotag data from the uploaded photos and attach it to the memorial records. Here's a link to one that we uploaded, and you can see the GPS info: Walter P Broyles

There's a Cemetery Photo Map link from the cemetery page, and that sounds very promising, but it doesn't seem to work yet. But as we know the GPS data is already in the system, so when they get it working it should be able to map the photos we are transcribing today.

Thank you, Find-a-Grave!