THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 27, 1994 TAG: 9407260120
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Coastal Journal
SOURCE: Mary Reid Barrow
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
Sally Carroll likens the search for old tombstones in Virginia Beach to what happens when you plan a small private wedding.
``You end up with 200 out-of-town guests,'' she said, laughing.
She and her husband Dean Carroll began recording the information and dates on tombstones in Virginia Beach during a Christmas vacation in 1988 only because they wanted some information for a Carroll family genealogy they were working on.
In that first week, they found 60 grave sites belonging to families of all descriptions. Now they have found so many, they have a book in the works.
``It was a fever,'' Dean Carroll said. ``That steel rod, when it hits a piece of marble, that's when your heart starts pounding.''
There's been a lot of heart pounding going on in the Carroll household since they began searching the city and probing the earth for graves that Christmas six years ago. The couple has recorded information from more than 200 tombstones and they are still counting. Their search has taken them all over old Princess Anne County - from Knotts Island to Lake Joyce, from the resort area to the Norfolk line.
``We started out at Knotts Island and systematically drove up and down each road,'' Sally Carroll said.
They used two previously published books: ``Churches, Their Cemeteries and Family Graveyards of Princess Anne County'' and ``Buried Treasures in Old Princess Anne County'' as a starting point. They rechecked the information and clarified the discrepancies in those volumes.
Now they are adding new sites which they have found, including black cemeteries that had not been recorded before. In the process, the couple also is lending their expertise and knowledge to the city's Department of Museums which is mapping the location of historic grave sites in Virginia Beach as part of a historic resources survey.
As the Carrolls drive around, they look for tell-tale signs of graveyards. The signs can include such nondescript sights as a cedar tree or two or a mound of vines in the middle of a plowed field, or a clump of daffodils in the woods.
`` `Aha, that's a grave site!' we'd say,'' Sally Carroll explained.
And more often than not, they'd be right. Even when no headstones were in sight, Dean Carroll would use his probe and usually hit buried stones.
In the 1800s, many farm families had their own family cemeteries, often up near the road and surrounded by a field of wheat or corn. Trees or daffodils may have been planted to mark the sites. Today the families may be long gone and the little cemeteries, overgrown in weeds, or worse, they even may have been plowed under by another farmer now working the land.
``We saw a clump of trees in a field behind Indian River Road,'' Dean Carroll said, ``and probed and found 20 stones.''
Another time they saw a mound of thorny briars in a field off Colechester Road. When they explored, they came across a group of 10 hand-hewn stones from the early 1800s with only initials and dates crudely carved in each one.
They've found broken stones, stones wrapped by tree branches that grew up around them and stones marked with criss-cross gashes made by plowshares. They've seen so many Princess Anne County/Virginia Beach headstones that they know approximately what dates will be on a stone by the shape of a stone.
``We know more about this county as far as graves go than anybody alive!'' Dean Carroll said.
Although it sounds like recording the gravestones of old Princess Anne is the Carrolls' profession, it's not. Sally Carroll works with Child Protective Services in the Virginia Beach Social Services and Dean Carroll is a social studies teacher at Princess Anne Middle School.
The early 1800s are the earliest dated tombstones they have found. Before then, many folks, unless they were very wealthy, used wood markers which have rotted away. In addition, before laws were enacted to protect graves, old tombstones were sold in antique shops, Sally Carroll said, and iron markers were melted down to make bullets in the Civil War era.
The loss of tombstones was what initially inspired the Carrolls in their research. They noticed that one of the Carroll family gravestones was missing only a couple of months after they had first seen it.
``Then we realized that a lot of those stones hadn't even been recorded,'' Sally Carroll said. ``And we realized that a lot of people in Texas, Missouri and all over the United States had roots in Princess Anne.
``We have gotten letters from out of the blue from all over the country from people who, by word of mouth, knew we were working on this book,'' she went on. ``They would ask something like, `Have you found my grandfather? He lived in the Pungo area of Virginia Beach.' ''
And if anybody had, it would have been the Carrolls.
P.S. A beautiful pigeon with a band on its leg has been hanging around Joan Wimbish's bird feeder in Princess Anne Hills. The bird has a dove gray head and neck with lighter body feathers. Its wings are rust or clay colored and its feet a brickish red. Call Wimbish at 422-2438 if you know anything about the lost pigeon. MEMO: What unusual nature have you seen this week? And what do you know about
Tidewater traditions and lore? Call me on INFOLINE, 640-5555. Enter
category 2290. Or, send a computer message to my Internet address:
mbarrow(AT)infi.net.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MARY REID BARROW
Dean and Sally Carroll revisit a grave site near a cornfield in old
Princess Anne County. The couple has recorded information from more
than 200 tombstones, and they are still counting.
by CNB