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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

This research investigates the Jonesville Cemetery, a historic African American cemetery located on the Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Georgia. Once a cemetery to a thriving freedman town, the Jonesville Cemetery was neglected for decades. Even though the cemetery is currently being maintained through joint volunteer effort between military personnel and community members, the cemetery still sits in the middle of the woods with a plethora of marked and unmarked graves. This mixture of marked and unmarked graves is also coupled with an inconsistency in the documentation of burials through death certificates. Due to years of community members coming and going, and records being lost, the descendants of those buried at Jonesville are hard to identify. This study employs archival research to investigate the Jonesville Cemetery through locating primary sources like death records, census records, marriage licenses, and land tax records. This research seeks to document the burials at Jonesville and to advance preservation efforts. The paper draws upon scholarship pertaining to Black cemeteries in the U.S. and the concepts of archival silence and reparative archival practice. Recognizing the enduring legacies of slavery and structural racism, it is motivated by questions of why Black cemeteries are neglected and disrespected, why cemetery archives are hard to come by, and how we honor the dead. This paper also examines the importance of reparative archival practice and the harm that archival silence has done to African American communities across generations. To honor the dead and help preserve the Jonesville Cemetery, this research located relevant documents—death certificates and census records—of those buried in Jonesville, with a focus on those without formal gravestones. By doing so, the goal is to help reconnect the descendant community to the cemetery.

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