LOCATING AND documenting cemeteries is not a task for the weak of heart. Very few older cemeteries are easily accessible by automobile. They may have some weathered old headstones, but quite a few of the much older sites may have graves marked only by fieldstones with no exact method of determining who is buried where.
I am currently working on documenting three family cemeteries in Nelson County and two other distantly related cemeteries, along with one abandoned church graveyard there as well. The walk to one of these involves driving 12 miles around and through surrounding mountains, then parking and walking another 3 miles up steep abandoned mountain roads to the cemetery site. The task requires fierce determination, but the results are greatly rewarding when one finally locates long-abandoned graveyards with their poignantly simple stone markings. To actually stand at the final resting places of long-gone relatives is well worth the strenuous journey.
My trek to the Gray cemetery at Travellers' Rest was much closer to home, but the task of finding it was no less daunting. On my third try, I climbed, stumbled and slid through miles of Rappahannock riverbank property, being scratched, bruised and whacked by small branches and, more painfully, thousands of the tiny little thorn bushes that thrive so abundantly along the river's edge.
More than once, I was threatened with the loss of a shoe as I pulled my foot from the ground only to have my shoe print fill immediately with groundwater. After 3 hours of hiking through the area, I came upon an indentation in the ground with significant brick scatter. This generally indicates the location of a house or similar structure. Continuing just a short distance farther, I came upon the Gray cemetery. The site was well worth the effort, and to find it still basically intact was a great surprise. To actually see the final resting sites of people whose names I have come across during my research on the area made the story of Travellers' Rest all the more meaningful.
Luckily, the cemetery was thoroughly documented during the 1930s for the WPA Virginia Historical Inventory program, as many of the stones have now weathered to the point that quite a few of the inscriptions are now illegible. Two new graves have been added since that time, the newest being that of Alymer Gray, the spinster daughter of John Bowie Gray, who died in 1969.
Physically, the memories of the long hike to the graveyard are still with me. I was pulling small twigs from my hair for the remainder of the evening and bear enough scratches to make one think I had tangled with a bobcat along the way. Two days later, my bones and joints ache tremendously and the jury is still out on whether the small marks on my hands will blossom into full-fledged poison oak, but I would make the journey again in a heartbeat!