Tinkling Spring Presbyterian Church is located in Augusta County in Fishersville.  It was founded in 1740.  I have only visited the parking lot here, but it's on my list of places to revisit.

Some of Archibald Alexander's descendants were active in the church and/or are buried in the cemetery.  These include Coiners, Gilkensons, and Wilsons.

New Providence Presbyterian Church is in Rockbridge County outside of Brownsburg. It was established in 1746.  I have been in this church for family reunions mainly.

It has a huge cemetery beside & behind it where people have been buried for centuries.  Many of my Willson relatives are buried here.  And my mother's great-aunt Grace Swain Brown is also buried here.  I just discovered that during the past year.  I saw that my mother's mother had lived with her Aunt Grace Brown in Richmond at the time of the 1910 Census.  Then I tracked Grace to see what happened to her & found out she had moved to Rockbridge County where her husband's family was from.  She had one son who died in his teens.  She, her husband, and her son are all buried at New Providence.

Timber Ridge Associate Reform Presbyterian Church is right across the street from Timber Ridge Presbyterian. It was formed in 1856.  I have never been inside the church as far as I can remember.  More significantly to me, it has an adjacent cemetery where many of my Alexander & Gibson family are buried.

My father is buried there, as are his parents.  My father's father died when my father was only 3 years old.  At that time, my grandmother purchased 16 plots for John Alexander (my grandfather) & his heirs.  She assumed that her three sons and their wives would want to be buried there.  Now that's planning ahead!

Apparently when my Aunt Midge (my grandmother's sister-in-law with whom she had had some issues) died in the 1950s, Midge somehow arranged to be buried in the Alexander plot.  Family legend has it that my grandmother had no idea that this was happening until she went to the funeral and saw where the hole had been dug.  She was really miffed at Aunt Midge for doing that.  My Aunt Nannie (another sister-in-law, apparently one with whom there was less friction) is also in the plot.

My Dad's two brothers elected to be buried in the Fairfield Cemetery along with their wives & the wives families.  So there's still plenty of room in the cemetery if we need it!

Two pictures featuring Nell Lyle Bonds Callahan.  In the top one, Nell is by herself; and in the bottom one, she is flanked by my parents. I'm pretty sure this was taken in her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when my parents visited. My cousin Bruce & my brother Graham also visited her. 

And I visited her once when I was on a business trip there.  At that time, she was 91 years old.  We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant near her home.  She was my first cousin twice removed...in other words, she was my grandmother's first cousin.  

Nell was quite an energetic woman.  And she told wonderful stories about her family's trip west.

Oakwood Cemetery (the subject of my last couple of posts) is located on Nine Mile Road just south of I-64 in the city of Richmond, Virginia. It is a huge cemetery, and I mean HUGE.  The picture above is just one view of a section of the cemetery.  No one picture does it justice.

Oakwood was established about 1854 and covers approximately 66 acres. Over 17,000 Civil War dead are buried here & they cover what looks to be about one-third or one-fourth of the cemetery...see the CSA sections at the bottom of the map below.

Plat A below is where my great-grandparents are buried,  They are in Section 3, lot 15, close to Memorial Drive. It is adjacent to the CSA sections.

And Section E, Division 9, lot 6 is where my grandparents are buried.It is on the same side of the cemetery as Part A.  Both of these are separated from the main entrance by a hill/ravine. 

This is my great-grandparents' tombstone--Annie Swain & Archibald D. Van Pelt.  Kate Van Pelt is one of their daughters.  This is also in Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.  And below is the entry for this plot in the office's books.

This shows that Annie Lettie Swain Van Pelt purchased the plots in 1902 when her daughter Kate died.  The other entries are their daughter, Louise Anderson, & her husband; daughter Grace's first husband, Samuel Moorman Royall; and Annie & Archibald.

This is how I spent a large chunk of my day today.  I drove to Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, to clean up my Barnett grandparents' grave site. The top picture shows you what it was like when I arrived and the bottom picture shows what it looked like when I left.  At first, I couldn't actually tell there was a tree in there. 

In the bottom picture, you can see the top of a neighboring tombstone in the midst of the bushes that wasn't visible initially.  I didn't get to excavate it, because I had my hands full with my family's plot.  I did remove the grapevine from the bush on the far right, which should help keep it away from all of these. But more probably needs to be done.  I would like to remove the tree, but it was too big for my clippers to handle.  I'll have to see how it turns out.  I'm not sure what kind of tree it is.

The picture below shows all of the debris that I cut away...more than I bargained for! I bagged up two bags of vines and smaller branches & was trying to figure out what to do with the big pieces when a cemetery employee drove up with a small backhoe and a shovel on the front.  We loaded the rest of the debris in the shovel & he disposed of it.  Thank goodness!

Afterward, I stopped in the cemetery office and asked if I could see any records they had on the plot.  The woman in the office was terrific!  She looked up the plat & I took the picture below. It shows that my grandfather, John Graham Barnett, purchased the plot on 9 December 1918, a day after his sister was buried there.  Eventually, he & his wife, his mother, and another one of his sisters were buried there, as well as his step-daughter's mother-in-law (Maggie Hawkes).

The woman in the office noted that he paid 30 cents a square foot.  She said the rate now is about $24 a square foot. She also gave me maps of the cemetery sections that an individual had prepared for them. Thank you, Mike Bordonie! And thanks to my friend, Maria, for suggesting that I blog about this.

Ben Salem Presbyterian Church.  I discovered this one recently.  It is located in Rockbridge County outside Lexington off Rt. 60. It was founded in 1832.

In my Archibald Alexander descendants transcript, there was a reference to Ben-Salem Church.  Specifically, a couple of the Paxtons lived on a farm near Ben-Salem Church.  I asked my cousin if he knew where it was, and he didn't.  So I did a little research and found it. It's a very small church but really cute.  I didn't see a cemetery nearby and I don't know if any of my relatives attended this church.