Moseley Family Patriarch Founds Family Cemetery on His Farm
Robert Cartwright Moseley: 1816-1896 (Maternal third-great-grandfather)
Family cemeteries were often a necessity for pioneers.
Church and community cemeteries weren’t always an option. Even if church members
could actually raise enough money to buy land and construct a church building, acquiring
enough land for a cemetery could take decades. Towns would charge for burials
in town-owned cemeteries, and many struggling rural families couldn’t afford
the expense. However, families could afford to set aside a small piece of their
own property to bury relatives.
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| Robert Cartwright Moseley, 3rd Great Grandfather |
Third-great-grandfather Robert Cartwright Moseley
established a family cemetery on his farm in rural Kentucky in the 1800s.
Findagrave describes this burial ground as follows:
“The Robert C. Moseley
Family cemetery is on top of a hill, with no signs. The cemetery is off of HWY
140. The entrance is from State HWY 2156-- you have to drive across a corn
field and up a hill. The cemetery is surrounded by trees on three sides. The
nearest community is Cleopatra.”
Most family burial plots were tiny, containing just a
handful of graves. These private cemeteries have been shrinking in number with
the passage of years. As farmers and developers grew hungry for land, many have
been destroyed, the coffins dug up and reburied in other, larger cemeteries.
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| Robert C Moseley Family Cemetery |
Fortunately, the Robert C. Moseley Family Cemetery had a
different fate. The farm remained in family
hands for many years, and the current owners obviously respect the memories of
the Moseleys buried there. In addition, rather than just a half dozen graves
like most family cemeteries, the Moseley cemetery has forty-three people interred
there. Most of the grave markers were stone and have survived intact or have
been replaced with newer tombstones.
It was probably fortunate that the cemetery is far from a
road—it kept vandalism at a minimum. Surrounded by a metal fence and a grove of
trees, it has been protected. The property remains beautiful if a bit unkempt.
In addition, as the news item below shows, extended family members have helped
to maintain the property over the years.
Why does this cemetery matter to our family? Nearly everyone
buried there is an ancestor—not something many people can claim about a
cemetery of this size. The only burials that are not blood relatives are relatives
by marriage, so every one of those graves is a person on the Aird family tree.
The first burial in the cemetery occurred in 1858 following
the death of a young daughter of Robert Moseley and his wife, Nancy Archibald
Moseley. Ten-year-old Ana Maria Moseley was born July 21, 1847, and died
February 17, 1858. The tall, narrow stone still stands 160 years later.
The second burial had me perplexed. According to a new stone
placed in front of the eroded original stone, the grave is that of Morgan
Prangely, who died at the age of 19 months in 1859. I struggled to find this
family in McLean County records. Did Robert permit a non-family burial? Then I
found records for the family of C.W.D. Prange—CWD were the first initials of
the father visible on the old stone. When I discovered that Prange had married
Maria Archibald, the connection became clear. Little Morgan was Nancy Archibald
Moseley’s little nephew—the surname had been misspelled.
In addition to Moseleys, the other family names in the
cemetery include Leachman, Litle/Lytle, Goode, Hancock, McFarland, Thomasson
and Underwood. All have relationships to the Moseley family.
Leachman:
There are five Leachmans buried here, including Susan
Elizabeth Moseley Leachman. Susan was Robert and Nancy Moseley’s oldest child.
She married William Parker Leachman, and they were the parents of Cora
Leachman, who was Lorene Smith Jandy’s mother. The Leachman graves include
those of Susan and husband William, and three of their children (Cora’s
siblings). Eldest daughter Eutopia or
Utopia, who died in 1860 at age 5, was the third burial in the Moseley
cemetery. Little Henry Griffith Leachman died May 2, 1877 at age 5, and Willie
Moseley Leachman, the tenth of the eleven Leachman children, died only a week
after his birth in September 1879. These three children would have been
Lorene’s great-aunt and great-uncles.
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| Leachman great-great-grandparents |
McFarland:
There are four members of the McFarland family buried here,
a husband, wife and two children. The wife, Nancy Catherine “Nannie” Leachman
McFarland, was another daughter of Susan Moseley and William Parker Leachman.
Nannie married farmer William McFarland, and they had three daughters. One died
in infancy—I had found no record of her until I examined the Moseley cemetery
records, so was able to add little Cora Belle McFarland to the family tree
(note: cemetery records mistakenly transcribed the stone as Lora Bell, but it
plainly reads Cora Belle, and we know that Cora was a Leachman family name.)
The second daughter, Betty Edith McFarland, died in 1888 at age three.
Underwood:
Margaret Moseley Underwood was the married daughter of
Robert and Nancy Moseley. She died at age 21, leaving one daughter.
Hancock:
This is an interesting grouping of graves, and goes to show
the decency of the Moseley family. The three graves are John Clevius Hancock
and his two wives. His first wife was Ara Lavina Moseley, one of Robert and Nancy’s
daughters. She died in 1873 at age 22, leaving a two year old son. Her husband
remarried, and he and his second wife were buried next to Ara in her father’s
family cemetery forty and fifty years after her death. What a testimony to the
bonds of family and inlaws!
Goode:
There are two Goode graves, both for young children. The
children were not siblings, but first cousins. Two of Robert C. and Nancy
Moseley’s daughters married brothers named Goode. Mary Allis Moseley married
John Sullivan Goode. Their first child, Willie Boyd Goode, died in 1874 at the
age of six months.
Sarah Frances “Fannie” Moseley married James Thornton Goode.
The second of their twelve children, Mary Margaret Goode, died in 1874 at the
age of six.
Litle/Lytle
Despite the spelling variation, the fifteen Litle/Lytle
graves are all from one family. Robert and Nancy’s daughter Minerva Moseley
married Julius Franklin Litle in 1858. The couple, both buried in the Moseley
Family Cemetery, had an astonishing 16 children! Ten of them are buried in the
cemetery with their parents and grandparents. Several died in early childhood:
Jemima, 1861, only 2.
Robert F., 1865, age 1 ½
James William, 1875, age 1
John Cartwright, 1875, almost 3
years old
Rena Mae, 1880, age 4
Mathilda, 1882, age six months
Aaron Estill, 1883, age two months
The final Lytles who lie in the cemetery were another of Minerva and Julius’ sons, Edwin Guy Lytle, his wife Priscilla Howard Lytle, and two of their sons, Paul William, who died at age 21 in 1918, and Archibald Holmes, who died at 21 in 1925.
Moseley and Thomasson:
Of course there are multiple Moseleys buried in family cemetery as well. In addition to Robert C. Moseley and his wife are several of their children, including Ana Maria, the first interment describe above, and Eleanor Shackleford Moseley, a young daughter who died just two months after her second birthday in 1865.
Robert C. and Nancy’s son, George Washington Moseley, is also buried in the cemetery, along with both his wives and four of his children. George married Mary Elizabeth Bryan in March, 1863. Mary gave birth to their son Robert E. Moseley on February 13, 1866. The baby died immediately after birth, and Mary died the following day.
George remarried months later to Mary Ellen Hancock (note: four years later, Mary Ellen’s brother John would marry George’s sister Ara Lavina). George and Mary Ellen had eight children. Two died in childhood and are buried in the Moseley cemetery: infant Joan and ten-year-old Eldred. In addition, their 22-year-old son Aaron Grant Moseley, who had just earned his medical degree, died of typhus acquired while treating patients.
The forty-third grave in the Robert C. Moseley Family Cemetery is George Washington Moseley’s grandson. His daughter Alice (Mary Alice in some records) married William Stout Thomasson in 1888 at age 18. She gave birth in July 1889 to their first child, Vernon Thomasson. Little Vernon died at four months of age, and is buried with his grandparents, great-grandparents and assorted uncles, aunts and cousins.
The final interment at the family cemetery appears to have occurred in 1944 when Priscilla Howard Lytle was laid to rest with her husband Edwin Guy Lytle. That means the cemetery was in use by the family for an astonishing eighty-six years, a period stretching from before the Civil War to nearly the end of World War II.
At some time
in the future, I would love to visit this amazing gem of family history, and
introduce my children to 43 members of their family tree. Since the cemetery is
on private property and would require trudging uphill through a cornfield to
reach, a visit might be difficult. However, it would certainly be worth it to
be surrounded by the tombstones of ancestors.
Sources:
Tombstone photos from Findagrave.com. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2533328/robert-c.-moseley-family-cemetery
Newspapers.com.
McLean County News, October 10, 1985 news item.
