Mecklenburg County, Virginia Cemeteries

For the last two months I have been working on a new project. A site dedicated to the cemeteries of Mecklenburg County, Virginia. I will have every cemetery listed on there, complete with pictures, GPS coordinates and any other information I can provide. It will be like the Brunswick County site done by John Pritchett. Right now I only have four churches from around the Bracey area listed and two private family cemeteries. I am hoping that next week I will be able to get more. It takes time to resize pictures, type up all the names and dates and index everything. I need to get the word out soon about the site so I can get peoples help in finding family cemeteries. The hardest part for me will be calling people to ask if they have a cemeteries on their land. I am not very good with talking to strangers on the phone. Or in person.

I can only imagine how many years this project will take given the size of Mecklenburg.

Winter is the best time to go looking for cemeteries. No snakes. I had thought that I would start off doing all of the church cemeteries then once they were all done I would go and find family cemeteries but then it came to me... church cemeteries are looked after far more than most private ones so it would be best to go to them in the warmer months and visit private family ones in the winter when I may have to walk through fields to get to them. 

I am also building a site for Mecklenburg County history and genealogy. I haven't had much time to work on it since I was concentrating on the cemetery site. I haven't completely decided what is to be on the site. I do know that some of the content on St. Tammany Farm will be moved over to there. Also I want to provide information to help others start or continue their research on their Mecklenburg families. I was also thinking about hosting genealogies done by others on families from Mecklenburg. I will post more on the site as I work on it and have a better idea of what the site will be about and what will be available on it. 

new Photo Album

Over the weekend I created a new photo album to show the pictures on St. Tammany Farm. The old way made it very hard for me to add new pictures without a lot of reworking old pages. I hope everyone likes it.

St Tammany Farm Photo Album

Martha Alevia Jones, Annie Riddick Bracey and Maude Louisa Bracey

This past weekend I was rescanning some tintype pictures, I noticed that one of them had some writing very faintly written on the back. With closer inspection under the light I saw it read Annie Bracey. 

Along with this photo was a tintype of her sister Maude, only that one was marked more clearly so I knew before it was Maude. I also spent last weekend scanning other tintype pictures we had only they were in frames. One picture in particular stood out. It had been on a small table in the hall for some months next to a picture of Viola May Bracey. No one can remember how it came to be on the table. I scanned it and noticed that the little girl in the picture looks very much like the picture of Maude from when she was a little girl. I compared them side by side and had my mother and aunt also look and they both came to the same conclusion, it was Maude in that picture....which ment that the woman in the picture with her was Martha Alevia Jones, her mother. This is the first picture we've ever seen of the first Miss Pattie. (Mont's first wife) so you can imagine we were very excited. 

I have posted the new pictures in the Bracey Photo Album.

Updates coming soon

I am currently in the middle of a job so I don't have time to update. But I do have some new information to share so keep checking back for updates. 

1864 Confederate Engineers map

Here is the picture of 1864 overlay. It gives you a good idea of where everyone was in 1864 and what is there today. I tried to scale it to the two places I knew about so everything else should be about the right place....give or take a few hundred feet lol. 

A milestone!

A few months ago I got Family Tree Maker 2008 and started inputting all of the Bracey family I had. Well yesterday I reached a milestone. I got to 2000 people! Right now I have 2074 names on my tree. And I know of a few more I could put in. If I were to have one large file with all of my family I'd have over 4000 names I'm sure. But can you imagine how long it would take for the file to open or save?

Sorry it has taken me so long to update this... Not much has happened in the research world. Haven't been able to get to the library in over two months. So all I've been able to do is online and go through papers I have here. Later I'm going to post a picture I copyed from Google Earth. I overlayed a 1864 Confederate engineers map over the part of Mecklenburg Co. my farm is located. It isn't a perfect match but its just about. It helps with finding out where everyone was in 1864 in todays terms. What I want to do next is find old Plats from people selling their lands and overlay them to tract the owners of the land. But right now I only have a few plats here. I will have to try and find some at the library next time I'm able to go.

Doll

A few weeks ago I was going through some papers and found a "transcription" of sorts my mother wrote on one of the tapes my grampa did. I dug out the tape and listened to it and he talks about his uncle Doll. Well it turns out he was going through a photo album and talking about the different pictures inside. One of them was of Adolphus Bracey! I about died. I have been looking for a picture of Doll for years. Turns out my aunt had the album at her house and this weekend I got it and have scanned the photo. Its a picture of the picture, don't know who owns the original one sadly. Very lucky person who does. I have already loaded the photo onto the site. It's in the Bracey Photo Album as well as with his genealogy.

Now the only photos of Paschal's children I'm missing now are of Virginius and Viola. But I don't think I will have much luck in finding pictures of them. I'm also missing a photo of Mont's daughter, Lelia.

Remodel

I decided to remodel the Photo Album pages of my site. And I think I'm just about done. Added alot more of the Bracey family, as well as some more Lambert's. Also added a new album. It has photos found with the Bracey family photos but they are unknown. Some were marked but none of the names fit anyone I know.

Thomas Harrison Bracey

For years there has been an old ledger in a box in my house. Never really noticed it until I started working on this site again. Well, a while ago I was going through the ledger and noticed a few names I recognized. Thomas R. Hendrick, father of Nannie Hendrick, wife of Alvis Orville Bracey, Sr., and Thomas Harrison Bracey, son of Samuel Bracey of Brunswick County. The ledger is from 1885 and is a record of births and deaths in the South Hill district of Mecklenburg County. It doesn’t have all the births and deaths, I’m sure of that; it isn’t large enough. But yesterday I was looking at it again and was looking around the Internet, and I realized that I couldn’t find Thomas Harrison Bracey’s death date anywhere. Ancestry.com doesn’t seem to have it or Ed Dunn’s site. I believe this ledger is probably a copy of the information that was sent to the state and presumably it is the same as Bureau of Vital Statistics records.

Interestingly enough, it seems that Harrison Hyram Bracey died the same year as Thomas Harrison Bracey.

I now have a Family Tree on Ancestry.com so more people can see the information on the tree, since not a lot of people have found my site yet. And I have now added Thomas Bracey’s death to it.

Samuel and Tabitha Bracey, Part 2

Just got back from the Library of Virginia a few hours ago. Spent most of the day looking up marriage records for the Bracey's. And I now have 110% proof that Samuel Bracey and Tabitha Hicks were married in 1795! Ancestry is wrong. I looked at the index and the original documents on microfilm and it said 1795 both times. 

I also now have all of Paschal Bracey's marriages, still can't find two of Adolphus Bracey's marriages. I'm wondering if he married in North Carolina. Which would mean a road trip no one can afford right now. Also found Hugh Davis Bracey's marriage to Frances O'Brian. Didn't have the date before.

Also looked at the Guardian Accounts for Mecklenburg County for Viola A. (Bracey) King's daughter. Viola it seems died around 1871 and her husband John Wright King died in 1877. A. H. Bracey was Viola B. King's guardian. She was in his household on the 1880 census.

The master list

A few weeks ago when I started working on the Bracey genealogy again, I started forgetting what I had done before and what information I already had and what did I need to look for, but now I have a master list! Every name to do with the Bracey family I have in the genealogy. (I know there are possiblely a few hundred names missing) Right now I have about 540 names in two files. I broke it up into two files. One for the ones with the Bracey last name and the other for the non Bracey names. Course that last one is the longest. About 400 names. I use it to know birth dates, death dates, marriage dates, who they married, who their parents are, where they are buried, and which records I’ve searched. Like SSN (social security death index), the wars (Civil War, WWI, and WWII), and which censuses they were on. I’ve also added columns for which names need updating on the site and if the person has been indexed. On this list I have birth dates I don’t have on the site due to the fact that they are still living.

Samuel and Tabitha Bracey

While looking at the Brunswick County Guardian Accounts for more details on Samuel’s kids I noticed that we seem to have forgotten two members of this family. Hugh Bracey and Rebecca H. Bracey. I have at least two copies of the pages of Samuel’s kids and failed to notice those two names before. Now I know my grandmother saw these pages...one of the copies was hers. Yet she left them out of the genealogy. I’m not sure why. In the 1820 Guardian Accounts the four children left have under each of their names “1/4 price of coffin in 1814 for HB.” They don’t seem to have anything on the death of Rebecca. But she would have to have died before 1820 since she is not listed in the accounts. The childrens names are also listed in a chancery suit in Brunswick County, Virginia.

Another problem I have is when Tabitha Hicks Bracey was born. She married Samuel Bracey on April 1, 1785 in Brunswick County, Virginia. According to the marriage record on ancestry.com. But my grandmother had it as 1795. The next time I am at the library I will check the records myself. I have quiet a few marriages I want to check on. The latest she could have been born is 1770 at least. And I’m not 100% convenced that the Tabitha King in TN in 1850 is her. The age doesn’t seem to fit. There is a Will for Tabitha King in TN and again I don’t believe it. Why would she leave out all of her Bracey grandkids? Did she and Benjamin King have kids after they moved to TN? If so it seems unlikely that they could have grown and had children of their own that quickly. But alas, I can’t go to TN to research it myself.

"Cap"

When I started working on the Bracey genealogy last month I had decided to fill in the blanks. Quite a few details were missing on a few people. Namely, Virginius Bracey, son of Paschal and Angelina Bracey. In the published genealogy, my grandmother has his name being Virginius Cameron Bracey, not even mentioning when he was born. It was like he was one of the forgotten members of the family. His entry in the genealogy is the smallest it seems. And it seems 70% of the information given is wrong. Sadly most of what my grandmother has isn't referenced so I have no idea where she got her information from....some I know are from my grandfather who loved to talk about the old days. His mother would tell him things that Mont, his father, told her about the area and his family. When looking at the Civil War records for the Bracey's, I noticed a Virginius S. Bracey, and a V.S. Bracey in the records. That's Cap. In the Riddick bible records of Nansemond County, he is listed as Virginius S. Bracy (We will forgive them for leaving out the e) I don't know where the name Cameron came from... There is a Virginius Cameron Bracey, but that is one of Caps nephews. ("Packs" son) While going through files my grandmother had on the Bracey family, I found a letter from A.W. Bracey, Sr. The first part of the page is a letter from someone in Arkansas about the Bracey family he remembered. It seems he was from Virginia and was recalling what history he knew on the Braceys. The letter had been sent to Hugh D. Bracey, Jr. in Deland, Florida. And I guess he sent it on to "Doll". The last paragraph is written by Doll. In it he gives information about his siblings. Including his brother, Caps, full name! Virginius Samuel. Judging by my grandmothers handwritting on the page saying "much of this is wrong" she had seen this page.. now why she ignored Caps name I will never know. I had yet to find a official document naming Cap as a Cameron so I will not be listing him as such. I have found more references as him being a Samuel so that is how he will remain. Sadly we don't have a family bible for Paschal... His house burned in 1916 so I'm sure the bible was lost. If it was still around we may have been able to have his correct name all along. 
Sadly, some of the Bracey genealogy has been published in a new book and in it at least twice they have made an error with his name. But it seems I am one of the few who has looked up his history. 
I have more news on Cap, but will hold off till later so I will have something to talk about. ;) Course if you go to the site it's all on there but here you can hear the back story on how the information was found.

A short intro....

I never know how to start these types of things....so I will just introduce myself. I am the granddaughter of Carstairs and Verna Bracey of Mecklenburg County, Virginia. For the past five years I've been running a genealogy site to do with the families connected to St. Tammany Farm. Hence the name of the blog....and the site. My grandparents gave the farm this name... before that it was simple known as the King farm. For the last few weeks I've been working on the Bracey family genealogy. It's been 50+ years since it was last really worked on in my family so I thought it was about time it needed updating. Not to mention changing. I have found a few errors that unfortunately others are picking up on and posting online. And in books...but more on that later. 
Really I should have started this blog with I first started researching this past month but never found the time. So I will fill you in over the next few days on what I've been finding and what I find from this point on as well. All the information I find will be put onto my site (www.sttammanyfarm.com) as I find it and can reference it. I don't take anyones information as fact unless they can prove it to be in some kind of "Official" way. (census, bible, birth or death records)