Documenting Ebenezer Cemetery
Hello everyone! I haven’t taken as many opportunities as I should have to update this blog as of yet, but it’s never too late to start, right? I think the perfect place to start is by talking about a project I’ve been chipping away at on-and-off for a couple of years now: documenting the cemetery at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
While it may not be the case everywhere, here in Upstate SC the website Find-A-Grave has reliably fantastic coverage. This is thanks, in part, to fantastic contributors like my friend Robin Coon, who created or manages over 90,000 memorials mostly in Greenville and Laurens Counties. Thanks, Robin! Still, every now and then, I come across a cemetery that has missing pieces on Find-A-Grave, and I discovered that this was the case for Ebenezer during a visit in 2022.
A little back story, first - Ebenezer is actually the spot where my love of genealogy and cemeteries first began, more than 15 years ago. After my grandfather passed away in 2008, my step-grandma made a memorial for him on Find-A-Grave, and my family noticed that his father (my great-grandfather, James Orville Staton) was buried nearby at Ebenezer and didn’t have a grave photo. We visited and found that his parents, my great-great-grandparents, were buried behind him, and my interest was sparked!
Fast forward to 2022, when I stopped by Ebenezer on a summer drive toward the mountains. Sadly, sometime in the 2010s it appears that the Ebenezer Baptist Church congregation stopped having services and the historic main church building fell into disrepair. Looking at the cemetery, I began searching Find-A-Grave on my phone and quickly realized that many graves had no listing. At first, I thought that only the section of the cemetery across the street from the church, which includes my relatives, was undocumented. I took as many photos as I could tolerate on the hot summer day, covering about 2/3 of that side, and listed them over the few weeks that followed.
Although it stayed in the back of my mind that I had more work to do there, various circumstances prevented me from getting back up to Ebenezer for another good documentation “session” until a few months ago, in early 2024. I had restarted research on a different branch of my family and discovered a long lost relative, a Civil War veteran, whose obituary revealed his burial at…Ebenezer! The Find-A-Grave pages for him and his family had no grave pictures, so I finally planned a return trip. I made quite a few discoveries - first, that it wasn’t just the across-the-street section that had been previously undocumented, but rather a random patchwork of graves across the whole cemetery. Second, I discovered that while his wife’s grave is marked, there is no marker for the relative I was looking for. I hope to apply for a marker to get his grave marked in the near future.
Over the course of four months and several visits, I’ve slowly but surely worked to get a significant chunk of Ebenezer cemetery documented on Find-A-Grave, although there is still work to be done. So far, I have added over 165 memorials, taken over management of another 15, and added a total of 323 pictures. I’ve completed all of the graves in the across-the-street section, and quite a few of the undocumented graves adjacent to the church. I hope that these memorials and pictures unlock discoveries for other genealogists and families!
As one final task at Ebenezer, I decided to try cleaning a grave. This sort of work is something that I’ve been working on over the last year, and I’m so excited about the results and the possibilities that it creates. Using D-2 Biological Solution from Atlas Preservation, I have been using the techniques I’ve learned at cemetery-related conferences and seminars to clean graves of my own family members. I’ve seen varying degrees of success depending on the stone material, but the Ebenezer cleaning was the biggest success yet! I cleaned the grave of J. Seldon Staton, who would have been my great-uncle but passed away as an infant in 1941. His grave had been darkening for years, but a few gentle scrubs and coats of the D-2 lifted the dark growth right off, and over time the bright white returned. Check out the results below. I’m excited to be able to add Grave Cleaning to the services I can provide at Staton Research!
To sum up, I’m proud of the work that I’ve been able to do at Ebenezer over the last few years, even though I know it is only a drop in the bucket of what many others have contributed to Find-A-Grave over the years. This pet project has been a full circle moment for me; relatives on both sides of my family are buried at Ebenezer, so I care a lot about the cemetery. On my last visit a few days ago, the cemetery has become quite overgrown (complete with a black snake!), leaving me with the impression that no one is maintaining the property now after two smaller congregations that met across the street have seemingly left. If anyone has ideas for organizing a cleanup - whether a regular maintenance plan or group volunteer cleanup days, please reach out! In the meantime, I will continue to make regular visits as often as time allows.
