I undertook last in 2009 to fully record, in letter and in image, my beloved Friendship Cemetery, where four generations of my family lie buried. This project has been all-encompassing and all-consuming, and there are still many objectives I have not completed. Even much of the work I have done is not ready to be presented. I intend to continue working on this in the long term, expanding, developing, and adding to what I can. But it’s now time for me to move on with other projects in my life (i.e. graduate school), and I wanted to present what I have, and place the rest in a place where it can stew contentedly on the back burner.
My goal is to record the present state of the cemetery, both for its preservation and for the sharing of that information. So far, I have enumerated and photographed all of the gravestones at Friendship, and have geographically surveyed the oldest section of the cemetery. This is the first phase of the project, and what I will share here. My master plan is to present a full-featured database offering extensive historical and genealogical information about the occupants of the cemetery, and showing the many links between Friendship’s families. I also intend to offer maps of my geographic surveys, possibly in an interactive form.
I’ve uploaded the photographs I took of the Friendship gravestones to FindAGrave.com. This will serve my purposes for the time being, until I can delevop my own database. Next I hope to link my own enumeration of the cemetery to the corresponding memorials on FindAGrave. But for now, if you’d like to see a gravestone I have listed in my enumeration, go to the cemetery’s page at FindAGrave and search by surname:
- Friendship Baptist Church Cemetery at FindAGrave
Also, because it preserves my formatting, I’ve kept the cemetery enumeration in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format, until I can figure out a better way to present it on the Web.
- Friendship Baptist Church Cemetery – Updated 2021
This is a work in progress. Please check back for updates from time to time.
Me and my brother are descendants of Edmond Dutton