Family History

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Smartphones, charged! Gas tank, filled! Another genealogy field trip was underway. Our destination: Charles County, Maryland, ancestral home of the Lloyds who are my stepson’s maternal line. Gary and I continue to marvel that one of our children has caught the “genealogy bug”-an elusive phenomenon that can strike an unsuspecting soul without warning, go viral within hours, and result in late-night, bleary-eyed hunts on FamilySearch.org.

Michael got bit, and we are happily feeding the bug. Our remedy is steady doses of information, administered as often as the patient’s system can handle: pictures here, death dates there, stories everywhere. Fortunately, Michael has a copy of The Lloyds of Southern Maryland, a book published in 1971 with extensive genealogical information. But Michael is seeking more-the photos, stories and details that bring ancestors to life.

He had asked us to take pictures of Lloyd, Queen and Dyer headstones in two Charles County cemeteries, Holy Ghost Parish in Newburg and St. Mary’s in Hughesville. Our plan was to use our smartphone cameras so as to upload the photos to BillionGraves.com. (This website requires that photos be taken with a smartphone to embed the GPS coordinates within the image.)

We entered the oldest section of Holy Ghost Parish Cemetery with a divide-and-conquer strategy: Gary started at one end and I was at the other. We walked and snapped our way through 300 tombstones in 90 minutes!

Carol uses her smartphone to take pictures and upload them to BillionGraves.com

I could not believe how easy this was! We downloaded the BillionGraves app for our phones, entered the name of the cemetery and took photo after photo-no special setup was required. Upon finishing, we uploaded the photos to the website directly from our phones. Michael located these on BillionGraves.com and transcribed the information from the headstones onto the website. Click here to see the BillionGraves record of Michael’s grandmother, Cecelia Lloyd Miller; click on the tombstone photo to enlarge it.

One cemetery down, one more to go. Or so we thought. As we headed to the address that Michael had given us for the St. Mary’s Cemetery in Hughesville, I noticed a sign for St. Mary’s Cemetery in Newport, which was obviously a different location. Curious, we followed that road, entered the cemetery and began walking the grounds. To our great surprise, we found several members of the Queen line buried there! Unbeknownst to all of us, there are two St. Mary’s Cemeteries just a few miles apart. (Note: always check online to be sure that there is not more than one church/cemetery/repository with the same name in the area you are visiting!)

St. Mary’s in Hughesville was our last stop where we hit paydirt-Dyer family tombstones were together in one section. Michael’s 2^nd great-grandfather, Austin Miles Dyer, is buried there. How surprised we were to find that he had served as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War.

This is an “official” Confederate tombstone of Michael’s 2nd great-grandfather. A “regular” tombstone for Austin is adjacent to this one. These two headstones together indicate that a family member made a special request to have the CSA monument erected.

Maryland was considered a border state and predominantly Union, with only 1/3 of its soldiers enlisting in the Confederate Army. It is most likely that the Dyer family was indeed “a house divided.” What a fascinating history that will be to uncover!

Most of my volunteer time is spent in various aspects of family history work at the National Archives, the Maryland Archives, and the Washington, D.C. Family History Center. I find it most rewarding to help others with their research, but helping my immediate family is absolutely thrilling! The “bug” that bit Michael is leaving its mark on thousands of newly-infected genealogists. Has it found you yet?

Carol Kostakos Petranek is a Co-Director of the Washington DC Family History Center, a FamilySearch Volunteer Coordinator, and a Citizen Archivist at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.