…This is to catch everyone up on the County Home Cemetery Project. Anyone driving past can see some of last year’s progress. The land has been mowed and the brush piles burned, three loads of topsoil have been delivered, and leveling started on the low spots. The old pipe fence has been removed around the front where it was failing. The physical improvements you can see are the hardware of the project.
I have been researching the Cemetery/Home by reading the Mercer Dispatch from the 1880s. This avenue of research opened up thanks to Shirley Minshull, our Society’s genealogy researcher. She read a write-up in the Dispatch of someone who died at the Home and was buried in the County Home Cemetery. Alas, not a new name, but it did set me on this line of research.
I have worked my way through 1881, 82, and 83. This reading has yielded some possible names and a wealth of general names (deaths, marriages, and reunions, etc.) that I have abstracted. I plan to continue this research up to the time when the County started keeping death records and then work backward from when the first County Alms House was built.
Woody Dixon, MCHS Archivist, Feb. 2016

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