Ginger and I had been discussing the effort that became this project for several weeks when, on March 31, 2018, we set out to find the Wilks Family cemetery using directions from the Fannin County GenWeb site. We headed to Carson, turned onto County Road 2700 and began to try to match the instructions we had to the reality on the ground. “Turn on the lane by the large pipe fence” had sounded reasonable enough back in my kitchen, but turned out to be woefully insufficient. We made one detour, executing a multiple-point (more than three for sure) turn on a narrow lane once we realized it couldn’t possibly be right. Back on CR2700, we continued, looking left and right for clues. Up ahead a pick-up pulled up at a gate, waiting for us to pass before turning onto the county road. We decided to ask the young man driving if he could help us, and stopped to chat. He could not, but his friend, who pulled up behind him while we talked, could. In a moment of serendipity almost miraculous, we met Mike Barbaro, the owner of the property that contained the Cemetery. And he generously altered his plans on the spot to take us to see it.
Had we or they been a few seconds sooner or later in arriving at that point, we would have passed like ships in the night, and this project would have taken a completely different trajectory. We would never have stumbled onto the Cemetery by ourselves. It is in an out of the way location deep onto private property.
The cemetery is in a beautiful glade surrounded by an old fence of upright wooden staves, dotted heavily with irises, and crowned by a large lilac bush. The fence is falling down, and the underbrush threatens to take over, but on that first visit, the lilac bush was blooming and I found myself thinking about the love with which it had surely been planted. Now lonely and overgrown, the place had obviously figured importantly in the lives of these families. I felt a tenderness and fullness of heart towards the inhabitants of this lovely place. Feelings reinforced as we walked among the tombstones and realized how many of them marked the graves of infants and children. The people lying there took powerful hold of my imagination and I knew that I wanted to learn all that I could about them. As we shared our reactions driving home, we realized that we had been similarly affected. Our project began to take on more form and direction, and we knew that these families would become ours.
Story by Wanda Holmes Oliver.
All but Forgotten, Resting in Peace. Photo by Wanda Holmes Oliver.
Sprig of Wilks Cemetery Lilac on my Windowsill. Photo by Wanda Holmes Oliver.