Another Cemetery

Neal Huskison and I were not content to end our travels over county roads in search of cemeteries of our ancestors without making the effort to find the back-roads’ route from my grandparents place near Thaxton to Liberty Hill cemetery near Lafayette Springs, in nearby Lafayette County, Mississippi. But, there simply wasn’t enough daylightremaining to sustain our day’s adventures, and we resolved to try our navigation skills at a later date.

The following Saturday afternoon seemed the perfect afternoon to pick up where we’d left off the prior week. I phoned Neal to check his availability,and he was at my backdoor in a matter of minutes. The warm peach cobbler on the stovetop was too much a temptation for him to resist, and he downed a helping before we left.

Neal and I are actually second cousins due to our respective fathers being first cousins. However, we grew up calling ourselves third cousins to each other. My folks either didn’t understand the "once removed" moniker for kinship or else didn’t use it. Thus, if my dad and Neal’s dad were first cousins, my dad and Neal were second cousins, which made Neal and me third cousins.

Neal and I were better prepared to traverse the meandering paved and sometimes graveled roads of rural Pontotoc and Lafayette counties, as we had both made extensive use of aerial maps of both MSN Live and Google on the Internet in the days prior to our second outing together.

We made our way to Thaxton and points north, traveling along what is not named Carter Road, crossing lands once owned by my relatives. Neal could remember where my great grandparents’ house once stood and recalled visiting there when he was perhaps three or four years old. The house he described, I grew up knowing as the place where a sharecropper and his family lived and must have missed the historical significance of the property then owned by Jessie Carter, my granddad’s brother.

Arriving at the intersection of Hurricane Road and Carter Road, we turned left and soon found CR 214 which led us directly to Liberty Hill Rd. We had traveled perhaps for two miles along Liberty Hill Rd. when we came up behind two women on a four-wheeler. Neal rolled down his window and asked if either of them knew about a cemetery across the road from Liberty Hill cemetery. The driver, the younger of the two, appeared to be a teenager and willing shared her knowledge of the area. Continue reading>>