H-56

Greenville News 10-Aug-2006
 
Historians blaze path to detail, preserve local Black history
 
Pair treks through back country to find, document long-forgotten 
cemeteries
 
By Lindsay Edmonds
EASLEY BUREAU
ledmonds@greenvillenews.com
 
Undiscovered family stories lie in the hills of the Upstate as 
two Seneca residents forge through the overgrown brush to reveal 
the history that lies beneath residents' feet.'
 
Paul Kankula and Gary Flynn have trekked through Pickens, 
Anderson, and Oconee counties in search of lost cemeteries in an 
effort to preserve forgotten heritage.
 
In documenting these cemeteries in the tri-county area, the pair 
realized that no one has ever touched on the history of Black 
cemeteries in the Upstate.
 
"Most of the old cemetery survey books, they didn't do Black 
churches.  They only did the White churches," Flynn said.
 
"We're trying to find all the churches," he said.  "The problem 
we're having is that nobody has ever done the Black churches and we 
have very little information to go on."  While most White cemeteries 
were easy to locate because they were well maintained, Kankula and 
Flynn have at times spent more than eight hours searching for a single 
Black cemetery.
 
The pair are 40 percent finished with their undertaking, which 
will be added to the online database on GenWeb, a national 
genealogical research project.
 
It's something that should be preserved," Kankula said.  "You 
know 1,000 years from now, somebody will be able to see what their 
family's cemetery looked like back in 2000.  They'll be able to read 
something on their family history and they'll be able to read the 
tombstone inscriptions."
 
Abel Bartley, director of the African-American (Americans of 
African decent) Studies program at Clemson University, said that 
finding information on Black cemeteries can be a difficult task, but 
the documentation of them is vital to history.
 
"You'll need to know who those people were, what type of economic 
activity they were involved in, how they came here and why they came 
here," Bartley said.  "That's often the information you can find by 
copying names from grave registries."
 
In Pickens County, about 24 Black cemeteries have been recorded 
by Anne Sheriff and Robert Dodson, who are working with Kankula and 
writing a book that documents the history of each cemetery.
 
"We are trying to preserve the names of the Black people in 
Pickens County who have died," Sheriff said.  "It's just never been 
written down for some reason.  It's not just Black history, it's a lot 
of family history and church history that hasn't been written down."
 

"You hate to see somebody who has gone through their entire life 
and left no documentation of their life," Sheriff said.  "This is a 
way of documenting that they did live and that they lived in that 
community.  They had children and lives."
 
Kankula, Flynn and Sheriff dig through old library books, analyze 
aged maps and listen to people nationwide for leads on where other 
cemeteries may be.
 
It started out as charity work for Kankula, but turned into a 
full-time job, where he spends six to 12 hours, six days a week 
compiling information.
 
About 900 cemeteries, Black and White, in Pickens, Anderson and 
Oconee counties have been documented and permanently preserved in the 
US GenWeb Tombstone Project Archives.