Genealogy on the Road: West Liberty, Kentucky

Three years ago my brother and I visited West Liberty, Kentucky.  I wrote about that trip in the blog post, “My Old Kentucky Home.”  One of the objectives of that trip was to find the graves of our great-great-grandparents, Goldman D. and Rachel (Sargent) Castle.  Unfortunately, after visiting at least a dozen cemeteries, we failed to find them; we finally gave up and went home.

Within a couple of weeks of returning home, I corresponded with a Castle cousin who told me that the graves we were seeking were in a part of Morgan County near West Liberty that had been called Panama.  When my brother and I started planning a trip for this summer, I used Google Maps to locate Panama.  The location was on Centerville Road before it intersects with Homer Gevedon Road.  I was pretty sure this was an area we had searched before, but we were going to give it another try.

As soon as we turned off Highway 460, I knew this was the same road we had traveled three years ago.  In fact, soon we passed Day Branch Road where we had stopped to take photographs in 2010.  We had been following another Castle cousin’s instructions when we passed a barn close to the road and looked to the right to see a cemetery on a hill.  My brother had charmed a pack of dogs and climbed the steep hill to find that this was not the Castle cemetery. 

This time someone was home at the house next door, and my brother went up to talk to the homeowner.  He told Tim that he knew the cemetery we were looking for; it was further down the road near an old barn.  He had recently remarked to a young neighbor that the cemetery was really overgrown; the neighbor had replied that since it was the Castle cemetery, there was no one left to take care of it.  Who would have thought there would be another cemetery on a point near a barn on the same road? 

So—we drove down the road, found another old barn, and my brother climbed the hill to look for the cemetery.  No luck.  This was getting old.  Driving farther down the road, we found another man working in his garden.  Tim got out and walked down to talk to him; pretty soon my brother started back to the car, followed by the man, who turned out to be Mr. Gevedon.  Mr. Gevedon stopped at his barn to get a 4-wheeler, I hopped on the back, and Tim followed in the car.  We went a short way down the road and then up a very steep gravel track.  Tim followed as far as he could in the car—which wasn’t very far—and walked the rest of the way up.

Graves were under the pine trees to the right

Tim had walked the right hill.  It’s no wonder he couldn’t find the graves.  They had fallen down and couldn’t be seen from the road.  They were covered in leaves, thorny vines, and a small pine forest.  We would never have found them without the help of someone who knew exactly where they were.  But we were in the right place—because there was a headstone there, still standing, that made this cemetery unique.  It said DONIA’S FOOT.

Caladonia was my grandmother’s cousin, the daughter of James H. and Elizabeth (Nickell) Castle.  According to my grandmother, when she was a young girl, she fell off the porch and hurt her leg.  Eventually, her foot had to be amputated, and it was buried in the Castle cemetery.  I’m not sure if that’s the whole story, as Caladonia didn’t live long.  She died when she was 16.

The cemetery also holds the graves of Caladonia’s father, James, and her mother, Elizabeth.  (James was the brother of my great-grandfather, George Turner Castle.  His wife Elizabeth was the sister of George’s first wife, Frances.)  We also found a headstone for Caladonia’s brother, Goldman, named for his grandfather.  We found the headstone of our great-great-grandmother Rachel, and finally, fallen from its base, the headstone of our great-great grandfather, Goldman Davidson Castle.  Tears came to my eyes as I remembered my grandmother talking about brushing her grandfather’s silver hair.

G. D. Castle

Rachel Castle

We wished we had known in what bad shape the cemetery was.  We could have brought tools to clean it up.  Honestly, though, it would have taken a chain saw at the very least.  What do you do in that situation?  We are probably the only descendants that have visited the graves in years, and no telling when we will be back.  It’s sad to leave them in such a condition, but having to work so hard to find them at all gave us a sense of accomplishment that we had shown them what honor we could.   

My Old Kentucky Home

When my grandmother left Kentucky in 1907, she never went back.  Morgan County was never far from her heart, though.  All of her siblings, except for the youngest two, had been born there.  Her mother and the other Day sisters who had lived in Morgan County all lived in Oklahoma. Even an old friend from home, Geneva Haney, lived in Tulsa.  When they got together, they reminisced about the old days back home.  

My grandmother subscribed to the Licking Valley Courier and even contributed articles when a newsworthy event happened in Oklahoma.  In later years she corresponded with her cousins, Effie Castle Walters, Hattie Day Egelston, and Mearil McGuire.  The names of families like the Elams, the Lykins, and the Haneys, and towns with names of Caney, Cannel City, Malone, Stacy Fork, and West Liberty, were as familiar to me as Davenport, Red Fork, and Tulsa.

Surprisingly, it was my brother who got the idea for us to take a trip back to Kentucky, just the two of us.  I guess not so surprising, because he was raised by my grandmother from the age of 4 months and just as steeped in the lore of her old Kentucky home.  We set off from Tulsa in July 2010, one OCD woman and one ADD man.  It’s a wonder we didn’t kill each other, but we didn’t even have an argument. 

Of course, the OCD woman had made an itinerary that included the St. Louis Arch and our ancestor (on the other side of the family) William Whitley’s house in Crab Orchard, Kentucky, but I wasn’t so OCD that I minded stopping in the historical utopian town of New Harmony, Indiana, or at Fort Boonesboro or at Ashland, Henry Clay’s house in Lexington, all on the spur of the moment.

William Whitley House

Ashland, Home of Henry Clay

The centerpiece of the trip, though, was a couple of days in West Liberty, from whence we set out to explore the courthouse, the historical society, and three million cemeteries.  (Of course, this was before the tornado that hit the town in 2012.)  We stayed in West Liberty and drove the winding State Highway 460 through all the little towns that my grandmother had told us about. 

We were looking for the cemetery where my great-great-grandparents, Goldman Davidson and Rachel Castle, are buried.  What we found is that there is a cemetery on the top of every hill in that part of Kentucky.  We got so we looked up every time we saw a hill, and sure enough, there was a cemetery there, many of which we duly explored.  We found some Castles and other related families, but not the ones we were looking for.

We had passed the same spot on the highway several times because there was a cemetery entrance across the road.  This time we read the street sign that said “Castle Branch.”  A family was working in their yard when we stopped to ask if they knew anything about the Castles.  All they knew was that the sign had always been there, but there had been no Castles there in their generation nor in the man’s father’s generation.  They did admit to knowing Virgil Castle—a prominent relative in the area, now deceased, that everyone had seemed to know.

We decided to call Virgil’s son and ask for directions to the cemetery.  We reached him by phone from the motel that night, and in his laconic Kentucky accent, he said, “Drive down the highway, turn at this road, look for a barn right beside the road.  When you see the barn, look back to your right up on the ‘purnt’ (point), and you’ll see the cemetery.”  The next day we drove there, and his directions were perfect, but I was A)unable to climb the incredibly steep hill up to the cemetery,  and B)scared of the pack of dogs roaming the neighbor’s yard. My brother, the intrepid former postman, made friends with the dogs, climbed the hill, but didn’t recognize any of the names in the cemetery.

We didn’t find the cemetery, but we did find another street sign.  This one said “Day Branch Road.”  Our family names are all over an area where no Days and few Castles have lived for 100 years.

We have not given up the quest to find the Castle cemetery.  We are going back this summer with directions from a Castle cousin.  If it turns out that we go back to the same cemetery that we visited before, I’m climbing the hill this time.