About five years ago I found out about Girod Street Cemetery in New Orleans. It was the first mainly Protestant cemetery in mostly Catholic New Orleans, started in 1822 by the Episcopal church which eventually became Christ Church Cathedral. The Wikipedia article about the cemetery has some great history, much of which seems chaotic. In 1833 there was a big cholera outbreak in New Orleans and the cemetery became a dumping ground for bodies. It was a mixed race cemetery, so there were tons of graves of black people, slaves, and former slaves. Because it was New Orleans with its high water table and frequent flooding, the graves were above ground, sometimes in structures six tombs high. Over time the cemetery suffered from neglect and by the 1940’s was in really bad shape, at which time it was decided to close the cemetery and redevelop the land. Families were asked to make arrangements to move the remains of their relatives, but I don’t know how many people did that. Ultimately a contract was awarded to another cemetery to haul everybody off and rebury them, but very little provision seems to have been made for preserving tombstones or keeping everyone straight. In 1957, just before the cemetery was finally closed, a Life magazine photographer took a bunch of eerie and horrific pictures of overgrown graves, broken into, with coffins spilling out. Google has a lot of those photos in a collection that allows you to start a slideshow of about fifty pictures. There is also a great blog page with some of those pictures and more history that is definitely worth seeing. I don’t think the photos were ever published in the magazine.
Category: Genealogy
The Brunsons, Part 2
It was neat finding out that my great grandfather, Roy Brunson, had a sister and then being able to track down some of her descendants. But also at some point in the last few years, someone had gone into Family Search and added some ancestors for Roy’s parents and beyond. Roy’s father was known only as J. A. Brunson everywhere I found him. I found a Josiah A. Brunson in Mississippi, so I added that name, but I wasn’t confident about it. With the recent updates J. A. now had parents, Joseph Brunson and Elizabeth J. Young. For a while Elizabeth was only listed as Elizabeth Brunson, because her maiden name wasn’t known. Eric pointed out that Elizabeth Young’s brother was Hiram Casey Young, a confederate colonel and 4-term United States Congressman after the war, representing Memphis, Tennessee. Today a Congressman’s district has 710,000 people on average. Back then the number was 123,000, which is less than the number of people in one of Georgia’s 56 state senate districts. He represented Tennessee’s 10th Congressional District, but today Tennesssee only has 9 districts. Even though Casey wasn’t a direct ancestor, he would be my 3rd great granduncle. But I warned Eric that the Brunson-Young connection couldn’t be trusted 100% since it was entered fairly recently and I don’t know what supporting evidence was offered. In fact, Family Search showed that Casey had one sister named Elizabeth and another named Eliza, both with different birth years, husbands and children, which seemed a little unlikely, especially since Young is a pretty common last name and Elizabeth such a common first name. So anybody could attach an Elizabeth Young to this prominent family of a congressman. Then an interesting piece of evidence came up from the website, findagrave.com which tries to index and photograph all the tombstones in the country. Here is findagrave’s picture of Congressman Hiram Casey Young’s tombstone from Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, which is amazingly simple, without his full name, the fact that he was in Congress, or even birth and death year, just “Casey Young” and Confederate flags:
The Brunsons, Part 1
Mom’s mother’s maiden name was Helen Brunson. Helen’s father, Roy Brunson, was shot and killed at work in Memphis while the rest of the family was in Birmingham in 1935, which was after Helen was married but before Mom was ever born. That was something I discovered when I found Roy’s death certificate online. Mom said she didn’t know about that, but I think Uncle Joe did. I was able to find Roy as a toddler in the 1880 census, living with his parents, J. A. and M. E. Brunson (they were even listed this way on their marriage license, but Roy’s death certificate listed his mother as Mary Steverson, which was close enough to find out that she was Mary Stevens, and find her parents), his brother Cecil, and his sisters Ss. E. and M. E. in Marshall County in the northwestern corner of Mississippi. It was hard to find out much else about that family. Cecil never shows up again in any records and I didn’t even know the names of his sisters. Women are hard to track down since they tend to change their last names when they get married. It was made more difficult because nearly the entire 1890 census was destroyed before it could be microfilmed. Then by the 1900 census Roy had married Velma McCord (they show 0 years married on the census) and they were living in Corinth, Mississippi, where Velma was from. That was about as far back as I could go with Brunsons back in 2014-2016 when I was doing most of my research. I did better with most other branches of the family.
The nice thing about Family Search is it is collaborative, like Wikipedia, so family trees are all public (living people are not public) and can be added onto by anyone and, sometimes messed up or fixed by anyone. Lately Eric has been doing some research so he sent me a text message this weekend asking if I knew that my great grandfather had been shot to death in Memphis. He sent me the death certificate, which I had found before, and a partial newspaper clipping that I had never seen:
Third Cousins
A few years ago when I was just starting to do some genealogy research, Eleanor told me about a relative of ours, Judith Chapman, who starred on The Young and the Restless and Magnum P.I., but Eleanor wasn’t sure how we were related. In fact Judith Chapman has been on a lot of soaps and guested on dozens of primetime TV shows since the 1970s. Fortunately the Cashin tree isn’t that complicated, mostly only going back to John Cashin, who emigrated from Ireland. In fact, all eight of Eleanor and Dad’s great grandparents emigrated from Ireland and settled in Augusta. We also know the names of a couple of their parents, but not much else that I’m aware of. So John Cashin is our great, great grandfather and anyone else who shares him as a great, great grandfather is our third cousin. Unless they also share John’s son, John J. Cashin, in which case they are second cousins, unless they share Papa, in which case they are first cousins. We know all of our first cousins. And we know a few second cousins, including the Bill Cashins and Stuart Cashins. We even know some third cousins, the Harry Cashins. I’m sure the Augusta Cashins know even more, but that’s as far as I actually sort of know anyone. Actually there may be fourth cousins because John Cashin seems to have had two brothers in Augusta, named Lawrence and Patrick, but that’s too much to keep up with right now.
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William J. Blythe, III
One of the neat things about FamilySearch.org, where I work on the family tree and look up records, is that it is collaborative, like Wikipedia, so people can work on their family trees and eventually maybe everyone will hook up into one giant tree. 
If I follow my maternal line back I run into my great, great grandmother, who was born Emma Ann Farr and who married Rufus Chapman McCord (I’ve written about the McCords before). Rufus McCord died pretty young, but had a lot of kids for Emma to raise. There is a great picture of Emma and her children and grandchildren, taken in Birmingham on Easter 1922 (shown below, she is in the middle with the lace collar). The picture includes a big chunk of that part of the family, including 3 generations of my ancestors, down to my grandmother, Helen Brunson, who was just 15, born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1907 (second from the right on the back row). She got married the year after this picture was taken, at age 16, but her marriage license said she was 18. Helen’s mother is Velma McCord Brunson, on the left side of the picture in the white blouse and directly above Velma is her husband, Roy Brunson.
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