We pulled out of Marksville yesterday morning around 8:30 and headed northwest to the bright lights of Paris, Texas. We are currently at the Spencer RV Park on the north side of town. After a good supper we planned to relax and watch a little TV. No luck, since we have no TV reception where we are located. This is a small RV park behind a RV Sales and Service business. We appear to be the only true campers here. Most of the rigs here are temporary workers in the area living in their rigs during the week.
Our purpose of stopping here is to do some grave hunting. My Dad's parents moved to Oklahoma from Red River County, Texas. They farmed near Detroit, Texas. The picture to the left is of what is left of the main drag through Detroit. (His Dad's family were originally from Georgia and his Mom's family were originally from Mississippi. Both families had moved to Red
River County and that is where my paternal grandparents met.) We have genealogy information that shows his paternal grandparents were buried in the city cemetery in Detroit. Our info for his maternal grandparents indicate they were buried in Bluff Cemetery over by Bagwell. We started out this morning for Detroit. All the way over their, about 17 miles, we were driving in a heavy fog with visibility of maybe 50 feet. This was also the weather we had when we started walking the cemetery. There are approximately 2,000 graves in the Detroit Cemetery. When working an old cemetery, with no plot diagram or lot markers, a person just has to start at one end and walk every row looking at headstones. Joanne took the north end, which appears to be a newer section and I headed down to the far south end, where most of the really old graves are located. We spent a couple of hours searching but failed to find any grave markers with the names William Jarret and/or Margaret Edna (Franks) Stone. In the old section there were many markers that were broken and crumbled or missing with only a base left. It also appeared there were many unmarked graves in this section.After we decided we were not going to find the Stones we headed out to Bluff Cemetery to find the Jones. My grandmother's parents were George Dennis and Georgia Ann (Garrett) Jones. Bluff Cemetery is about five miles north of Detroit. This cemetery was in more need of repair than the one in Detroit. Again we divided up and started looking and again failed to find either grave. What we did find was more sand burrs than either of us has seen in years. When we finally gave up we had to spend several minutes picking the burrs out of our shoes and socks. Those little things really like to cling to shoe laces. (This was Joanne's first time to join me in a grave search and, after today's experience, will probably be her last.) After our searches we headed on east to the town of Clarksville, the County Seat of Red River County, for lunch. Stopped at a little diner in town but found the meal about as disappointing as our grave search this morning. Now we're back in the coach in Paris. We'll head out tomorrow morning for home. It's been a great trip and we have had an enjoyable time.
1 comment:
It is disappointing, perhaps, but I still think that genealogy is a bigger theatre and your imagination always larger than the TV for which you had no reception. However, perhaps our own personal history is a show for which we are each the most enthusiastic.
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