So where did the church go????… (and where to find it)??? www.findagrave.com by Jim Curran
Jim Curran shared a link.
So where did the church go???? (and where to find it) ????
Many times when researching a church that is 100 years or older you will find that it has unfortunately disappeared. The reasons may be manifold, false doctrine got in, perhaps there was a split or other issue. Often the demise of rural churches was simply that- they were rural. As populations urbanized and agriculture consolidated due to increasing mechanization their populations vanished. Many of the older Baptist Churches in the South, Midwest and West were rural churches. Sometimes there was a building remaining, often this might have been repurposed as something else. However often there was one thing that prevented this reuse to something other than a church- a cemetery. This very thing that resulted in the inability to reuse the land resulted in the preservation and location of the site. Often we do not have the location from such things as association records but we can locate them by the cemetery. The best tool to do so is www.findagrave.com They have extensive cemetery records for most cemeteries in the US (and an increasing amount for other countries.) Search under cemeteries narrowing by state/ county. As a helpful hint try searching by just the specific name- so for Bethel Baptist Church try “Bethel” (narrowing by county or you will get too many results) Many times after a church died the cemetery might continue in use without the rest of the name. Another possible use of the website is the specific grave records- if there is a last name that was common in records of the church you might be able to use that to find the cemetery. I have located the locations of several churches by both methods. Hope this might be a help to your research.
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