Mecklenburg County, Virginia Cemeteries

About the project:

The goal of this project is to gather everything we can collaboratively find about Mecklenburg cemeteries and make it accessible in one place. Each cemetery will have links to Find a Grave, Billion Graves, and page numbers to Munsey Moore’s cemetery books. Church cemeteries will also have any known history of the cemetery, a few surnames from the cemetery, list of veteran tombstones at the cemetery, and a few overview pictures of the cemetery. Cemeteries we’ve heard about from deeds or those we remember our grandparents having talked about it, including cemeteries with field stones or whose locations are unknown will be listed on this page. Cemeteries are listed in three categories: town cemeteries, family cemeteries and church cemeteries.

Cemeteries with field stones

Burials in many early cemeteries in Mecklenburg County, Virginia were marked by stones farmers pulled out of their fields. A field stone was just a rock used as a marker. These were not inscribed with any information. Ready cash was scarce, so the cost of a tombstone was not even considered. Instead, extended families would gather yearly to cut back vegetation around their ancestors’ graves while the older family members told where each each person was buried and stories about them. After World War II, as the economy started improving, tombstones became more common and these family traditions faded. The few people still living who remember these family reunions were young children when they last heard these stories.

I talked to Stephen Lambert Jr and Sr in August 2004 about the cemetery where Nellie Brooks and Frederick Jones are buried. Lambert descendants knew which burial plot was Nellie’s and which was Frederick’s because of a drawing of the cemetery that was kept in the Family Bible. The tombstones were placed there in the early 1960’s, approximately 145 years after Frederick died.

On each visit I’ve made to Mecklenburg, I showed people where family cemeteries are marked on 1960’s USGS topographical maps and asked if they knew about these or any other family cemeteries. As we visited these cemeteries sometimes relatives were surprised to find that a tombstone had been placed for their ancestor. When they last saw the cemetery as a young child, there were only field stones.

Most family cemeteries are not visible from the road. Many cemeteries are in areas that haven’t been farmed or cleared for at least 20 years, so there are usually briars, vines, small trees and brush to get through in order to access them. I visit Mecklenburg more frequently in the winter to look for cemeteries because the brush has died back.

On the Mecklenburg collaborative map, cemeteries are marked by maroon colored symbols. Town and family cemeteries are marked by an upside down letter “T”, which I thought looked closest to an upright tombstone. Churches with cemeteries are marked by a maroon colored cross.

In the summer of 2019, I went to a cemetery in Bracey. There were remnants of a fence still visible in some places. We could see 6 rows of burials with field stones marking head and foot areas. We saw some land depressions, but no names or carved information anywhere. We estimated this cemetery had about 45 graves.

I took a picture tagged with GPS coordinates and found this cemetery is on land which used to belong to Samuel McKinney and his wife Elizabeth Newman. There are no records to show who was actually buried here. No one has any family stories but it is highly likely Samuel McKinney and Elizabeth Newman were buried on their land.

What can a cemetery without tombstones tell us? If there was a family of 12 children, but only 3 burials, I know to look for the rest of the family moving away. A shorter distance between a head and foot marker indicates the burial of a child. People marked the family cemetery with 4 corner trees and planted periwinkle to keep the weeds down. We can see when cemeteries have been extended, because there are orderly rows of field stones outside the corner trees. The burials outside the trees would have been done more recently than the planting of the corner trees.

Town Cemeteries

Family Cemeteries

Alphabetical by main surnames

Roanoke Chapel Christian Church, Palmer Springs area 2021

Church Cemeteries