My baby brother, Arthur Lee Durham, was buried in Elm Grove Cemetery in 1949.  He was born August 22, 1949 and died August 24, 1949.  Death certificate shows burial August 25, 1949, Elm Grove.  I wondered if there was a marker or record of the location in the cemetery.  I have pictures of the grave site but there are no monuments around.  Only dirt and prairie and mountains in the distance.  I was 7 at the time.  We lived in Presidio where my dad was employed at Agent of the Santa Fe Depot.  Is there a map showing the lot numbers, etc.?   Thank you,  Linda Jansen Photo is gravesite of: Arthur Lee Durham - August 22, 1949 - August 24, 1949 Son of Obe Earl Durham and Fern Audrey Durham Date of Burial - August 25, 1949 Elm Grove Cemetery, Alpine.  Arthur was born at the Lockhart Clinic Hospital - Dr. L. W. Dumas - Alpine   The death certificate is signed by Funeral Director Chas Livingston, if I am reading it correctly.  I am guessing that Chas stands for Charles.  It was a lonely place and a sad day.  Mother was still in the hospital.  There were only a few of us there.   I only remember standing close to Dad.  I appreciate your help in looking for the site.  I knew it would be difficult after all of this time.   The Smith name is not familiar to me.   Dad, Obe, passed away in July 2003 and Mother passed away December 26, 2005.   Thank you again, Sincerely, Linda Durham Jansen     If you have a family story you would like to share please send it and I will post it.  Thank you. Peggy Trammell Allen

Mary Bell Lockhart Here’s an article about what we’re up to on the cemetery.  Lonn Taylor is a local historian and I contacted him about a connection between a grave site and the person’s history.  He doesn’t mention that part here.  But I talked to him about getting more history articles done and connecting them to the graves of the person via the website.  I’ve got the complete research done on 1A will send it shortly. Big Bend Sentinel, Marfa Texas November 15,2007 The Rambling Boy Elm Grove Cemetery yields intersting finds By LONN TAYLOR I had wanted to meet Mary Bell Lockhart of Alpine every since she sent me an e-mail describing her work documenting the tombstones in Alpine’s Elm Grove Cemetery. I am extremely fond of cemeteries, both as places for a quiet afternoon walk and as gateways to the past. This fondness goes back to childhood drives on country roads around Fort Worth with my grandmother, who could not pass a country cemetery without saying, “Let’s just stop and see who’s in there.” She would not only read all the tombstone inscriptions but she would point out the old varieties of roses and other ornamental trees and plants growing there, and identify the birds that were nesting in them. I learned from her that cemeteries are more than burial places. I am always anxious to meet another cemetery buff, and I was delighted when Lockhart offered to tell me more about her work last week. It turned out that Lockhart is far more than a buff. She is a genius of cemetery documentation, a woman who has a vision of recreating the entire history of a community from the inscriptions on tombstones, with a little help from the computer. Lockhart is an Alpine native who came back home after retiring from the Austin-Travis County Health Department, where she worked for 27 years as an environmental health specialist. She told me that her project started when she decided to learn something about her Lockhart ancestors, who came to Texas in the 1830s. She started looking for deceased Lockharts in the cemetery records on the Texas GenWeb website, a research tool produced by a volunteer group of genealogists who have placed a wide variety of genealogical data on the web (Texas GenWeb is part of a nationwide genealogical research project called US GenWeb). The Texas website is broken down by counties, and within each county volunteers have copied the tombstone inscriptions in selected cemeteries and posted them on a section of the website. What Lockhart discovered was that many of the cemetery listings that she consulted had a note saying that they were incomplete. She ran a controlled test by visiting some cemeteries in Llano County whose web listings she had examined without finding any Lockharts and sure enough, there were Lockhart graves in several of them. Being a methodical person, she started thinking about what it would take to do a really complete survey of a cemetery, drawing together as much information as possible about each permanent resident, and she decided to make Alpine’s Elm Grove Cemetery the subject of a model project. The graves at Elm Grove are grouped into a dozen blocks separated by walkways. Lockhart visited all of the graves in one block, photographing each tombstone and taking down the name, birth and death dates, epitaph, and any other information found on it. Then she got on her computer and searched for additional information about the deceased in various on-line data bases: the Texas birth records; the Texas death records; the Social Security death records, the World War I draft registration records, and, most informative of all, the U.S. Census records, which are open to the public through 1930 and contain an enormous amount of information about birthplaces, occupations, levels of education, and ages and birthplaces of children. She entered all of this information into her computer on an Excel spreadsheet. Then she added information gleaned from newspapers and other sources in the Sul Ross Archives, and topped it off with her own memories (she was born in Alpine in 1948, and since her father was a doctor she knew everyone in town when she was growing up). The result is a vast compendium of information about everyone buried in one-twelfth of the graves in the cemetery. It is both a monument to Lockhart’s persistence and a reminder of how much information about individuals is available on the internet. If she works at it steadily for a year, she will have reconstructed the lives of a good chunk of Alpine’s residents who can no longer speak for themselves. I asked Lockhart if she had discovered anything out of the ordinary on her perambulations around the cemetery. She grinned and switched the computer to a power point presentation that she was about to show to the Alpine Kiwanis, of which she is an active member. The first image that came on the screen was a handmade monument, a concrete tombstone with pebbles set into it and the words “Lee Walker, born Dec. 16, 1882 – died May 21, 1947” scratched into its surface. “He was a cowboy on the Stillwell Ranch,” Lockhart said. “I guess his family couldn’t afford a tombstone.” The next image was an ornate plinth commemorating the life of Alfred H. Irby, who was born in 1872 and died in 1892. Beneath a pair of clasped hands, a beautifully engraved inscription reads, “No pompous marble to thy name we raise, this humble stone bespeaks thy praise, a loving son and faithful friend.”  Lockhart made no comment on this contradiction in stone. The third image was a sheet metal tombstone with letters cut through it that spelled out a name, birth and death dates, and the words, “We Love You Dad.” Below the words were the outlines of a spur and a cowboy hat, also cut through the metal. “That one will last,” Lockhart said. The final image was the tombstone of a friend of Lockhart’s, Carolyn Bishop Nelon, which had simply the deceased’s name and birth and death dates on it but which also had a peculiarly scalloped top. “I thought this stone looked a little old-fashioned for someone who died so recently, “ Lockhart said, “so I looked on the other side.” She showed me the next image, which was the reverse of Nelon’s stone. It bore an ornate inscription commemorating Virginia E. Henderson, who was born in 1858 and died in 1884. “That was Carolyn’s great-grandmother,” Lockhart said. “She was buried in a family cemetery in Kimble County, but that cemetery was abandoned and when they took up the tombstones Carolyn got this one and kept it in her garden. She always said that when she died she wanted it on her own grave so that when people came to visit her they would be visiting her great-grandmother, too.” “All of this is just in one block of the cemetery,” Lockhart said. “Think what must be in the rest of it. There are so many stories there, and those stories shouldn’t die when the people die. That’s what I’m trying to save.” You can check out a sample of her efforts at www. rootsweb.com/~txbrews.2. Click on “Cemeteries,” then on “Elm Grove Cemetery,” and then on “Block 1-A.”  Lonn Taylor is a historian and writer who lives in Fort Davis. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.