New Fairfield cemeteries -- Part 1

At Old Franklin Church cemetery, 2015

The nice thing about a cemetery is that it tells us our future. It's where you will probably end up someday.

The nicer part of that is that you will probably be there alongside people who were important to you.

Which is what makes cemeteries more fun than somber. They leave a footprint. The people who are interred in them are the history of the community they left behind. They are the thread that leads to you.

Regardless of why people are interred in cemeteries, the fact remains: We put them there and make a note of it somewhere not far from that spot.

Tombstones.

Aside from an occasional peony bush or a leaning old elm tree off near a rusty old fence line, that's about it.

Everything else either is carved on the stone or from your imagination.

The three main accessible cemeteries in the Fairfield area are ripe with history, both robust and sad. In some cases, we need to do a LOT more to address the needs of those little living (if that's appropriate) history books.

Franklin and Union county genealogy websites are full of data on the graveyards in the immediate Fairfield area, those being:

Sims-Brier
Old Franklin
Bath Springs

These blog entries will take a stab at describing those graveyards, what has happened to them since they were established and, perhaps if we are lucky, what is likely to happen to them in the future.

It's unlikely they will get smaller.

It's a certainty that if you visit these places, your past, present and future will bump into each other.

There are a lot of cemeteries in Franklin County. I won't attempt to visit the ones outside the immediate Fairfield area.