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Appalachian Genealogy • Cemetery Documentation • Local History Preservation

Uncovering forgotten roots, preserving history, and honoring the stories woven through the hills of Appalachia.

The Man Who Lived With a Bullet in His HeartSome family stories sound too unbelievable to be true until the records star...
04/06/2026

The Man Who Lived With a Bullet in His Heart

Some family stories sound too unbelievable to be true until the records start backing them up.

William B. Smallridge of Glenville, Gilmer County, West Virginia, was my 3rd great-grandfather.

He served as a private in Company E, 3rd West Virginia Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. He was a Union soldier. According to an old newspaper clipping, in September 1861, while marching through Gilmer County, he was shot in an ambush.

The bullet entered near the lower part of his left shoulder blade, passed through his left lung, & lodged in the left ventricle of his heart.

His wound was declared fatal. The regimental surgeon reportedly left him to die.

But William didn’t die.

He was sent back up the Little Kanawha River to his home in Glenville, where he somehow recovered & then lived another thirty-seven years with that bullet still inside him.

A few weeks before his death, William asked Dr. G. O. Brown to examine the wound after he passed. When the doctor did, he found the bullet embedded in William’s heart.

The newspaper called it “the most extraordinary case on record.”

William B. Smallridge died on October 29, 1898, decades after the Civil War ended. He had carried that war inside his own body for the rest of his life.

This is the kind of story that reminds me why I started Digging Up Appalachia in the first place. Behind every faded record is a real person & sometimes, that person is your own ancestor with a story almost too incredible to believe. He wasn’t just a name in an old clipping, he was part of the reason I’m here today.

There’s something about walking through a cemetery full of old stones that makes time feel a little less distant.This on...
31/05/2026

There’s something about walking through a cemetery full of old stones that makes time feel a little less distant.

This one was filled with beautiful old markers, many dating back to the 1700s & 1800s. Some are still standing strong, while others are weathered, leaning, or slowly fading back into the earth. But every single one belonged to someone with a story.

That’s what always pulls me in. It’s never just stone & dates. It’s families, communities, love, loss, & lives that once mattered deeply to someone.

Older cemeteries like this feel like outdoor history books. The worn names, faded inscriptions, & handmade details all tell pieces of the past, even when time has made them harder to read.

I always find myself wondering:
Who were they?
What did their lives look like?
Who still remembers their names?

That’s one of the reasons I love documenting places like this. Even if all I can do is share a photo, read a name, or bring attention to a forgotten stone, it still feels like a small way of saying:

You were here. You mattered. You are not forgotten. 🪦🤍

I wasn’t posting much this past week… but I was still out listening to the stones. 🪦🌿I spent a little time at Norborne C...
25/05/2026

I wasn’t posting much this past week… but I was still out listening to the stones. 🪦🌿

I spent a little time at Norborne Cemetery this weekend, & this photo felt like exactly the kind of thing that made me start this page in the first place.

Rows of stones tucked under trees. Some names still easy to read, others slowly fading. Families resting together. Stories scattered across the grass, waiting for someone to stop long enough to wonder who they were.

That’s the thing about old cemeteries. They’re not just places of loss. They’re records. They’re maps of a community. They show us which families stayed, which names repeated, which lives overlapped, & how deeply rooted some of these Appalachian lines really are.

Sometimes history isn’t hidden in an archive.

Sometimes it’s sitting quietly beneath the trees.

Have you ever walked through an old cemetery & found a name that made you want to know the whole story?

— Digging Up Appalachia

Old cemeteries are more than burial places. They’re outdoor archives.They hold family lines, forgotten spellings, milita...
18/05/2026

Old cemeteries are more than burial places. They’re outdoor archives.

They hold family lines, forgotten spellings, military service, infant losses, epidemics, migration patterns, marriages, remarriages, & entire community histories carved into stone.

Sometimes a cemetery can tell you what a courthouse record doesn’t.
Sometimes it confirms a family story.
Sometimes it raises even more questions.

& sometimes, like this stone, the story is still there… but slowly fading from view.

That’s why documenting & preserving these places matters.

When stones sink, break, disappear, or become unreadable, we don’t just lose a marker. We lose a piece of someone’s story.

Is there a cemetery, family stone, or old graveyard that has always made you wonder about the stories behind it?

Some surnames just keep showing up again & again in the family tree. 👀These are a few of the names I keep running into w...
15/05/2026

Some surnames just keep showing up again & again in the family tree. 👀

These are a few of the names I keep running into while digging through my Appalachian roots:

COLE
KESECKER
STAUBS
JUNKINS
MOORE
FALLON
SENSENEY
MARKER
INGRAM

Some lines are easy to follow. Some turn into a tangled mess of remarriages, stepfamilies, missing records, cemetery stones, & “wait…how are they connected?” moments. 😅

Now I’m curious — what surnames keep showing up in YOUR family tree?

Drop your Appalachian family names in the comments. Bonus points if you add the county/state they’re from. I’d love to see if any of our lines cross! 🪦🌿

Sometimes a headstone gives you more than just a name & dates. Sometimes it points you straight back into the history of...
13/05/2026

Sometimes a headstone gives you more than just a name & dates. Sometimes it points you straight back into the history of a town.

This marker belongs to George W. Appel, 1853–1911, noted here as the designer & builder of the Hedgesville Presbyterian Church in 1893.

I’ll admit, the boot print across the stone made my heart sink a little. It’s a small reminder of why cemetery respect & preservation matter so much. These markers are not just stones in the ground. They are records, memorials, & pieces of local history.

The people buried in our local cemeteries didn’t just live here. They shaped the places around them. Churches, homes, roads, farms, families, & communities were built by names we may walk past without realizing their impact.

One marker. One name. One piece of Hedgesville history still speaking from the ground. 🌿⛰️

One thing I’ve learned very quickly while researching Appalachian genealogy is that these mountains hold deeply intercon...
12/05/2026

One thing I’ve learned very quickly while researching Appalachian genealogy is that these mountains hold deeply interconnected stories.

The same surnames appear across cemeteries, census pages, marriage records, church documents, and old newspaper clippings generation after generation. Families moved across county lines, married into neighboring families, reused the same names over and over, and left traces of themselves scattered all throughout Appalachia.

Sometimes it feels like every rabbit hole leads back to another familiar name somehow. 🌿

Do you have any names that repeat through different generations of your family?

Some stones tell entire stories in only a few words.No name. Just “INFANT” and the year 1906.More than a century later, ...
11/05/2026

Some stones tell entire stories in only a few words.

No name. Just “INFANT” and the year 1906.

More than a century later, this small marker still quietly holds the memory of a life that was here, however briefly. There’s something deeply humbling about walking through old Appalachian cemeteries and realizing how many stories were never fully written down, yet were still loved, mourned, and remembered by someone.

Even the smallest stones matter.

One thing I’ve learned researching Appalachian family lines is that records rarely tell a perfectly clean story.Names ch...
11/05/2026

One thing I’ve learned researching Appalachian family lines is that records rarely tell a perfectly clean story.

Names change spellings. Ages shift from census to census. Entire families seem to disappear and reappear across county lines. Fathers, sons, cousins, and brothers often share the exact same names across multiple generations.

Sometimes piecing together Appalachian genealogy feels less like following a straight line and more like slowly untangling a knot one thread at a time.

But honestly… that’s part of what makes it so fascinating!

There’s something about old Appalachian cemeteries that keeps pulling me in.The history, the forgotten stories, the fami...
11/05/2026

There’s something about old Appalachian cemeteries that keeps pulling me in.

The history, the forgotten stories, the family connections, the craftsmanship of the stones, the weathering, the quietness of these places. It all feels like pieces of Appalachia waiting to be remembered.

One stone can hold generations of history. Even when parts of the story have been lost to time, there’s still something incredibly powerful about standing in a place where so many lives, families, and memories still exist side by side.

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