Students record cemetery

(From the Cleveland Daily Banner....March 20, 2011) 

With the recent state and national attention being focused on the importance of Charleston in relation to the Cherokee Nation and the Civil War, the Walker Valley High Future Business Leaders of America recently completed a service project for the Charleston-Calhoun-Hiwassee Historical Society.

The project was to catalog and record all the burials in the Historic Cumberland Presbyterian Church Cemetery, photograph all tombstones, record the findings in a book and publish the results to various websites related to genealogy and historical research.

The local school business club chose the project and presented the idea to the local historical society, which was eager to accept the proposal.

With each year that passes, more and more grave inscriptions in older cemeteries become harder to read. Facts and historical information are lost. Records of pioneer families become obscure, and history that remains hidden will not surface.

This project of the FBLA club would ensure these valuable cemetery records would be available for future generations.

The club members divided the cemetery into grids and photographed it as a whole, identifying the various sections. Then members worked in pairs to record available burial information on the tombstones.

Grave markers that were hard to read were sprayed with colored chalk to reveal the faint inscriptions. Markers that were broken were pieced back together to determine the information recorded on them.