Who is Buried at the Akridge Family Cemetery?

A few months ago, I introduced you to the Akridge Family Cemetery, a small site on the west side of Atlanta. I’m happy to now be able to introduce you to several of the individuals buried in the cemetery.

Along with members of the Atlanta Urban Design Commission, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating forgotten cemeteries as part of the Atlanta Cemetery Network. In order to find them, we use resources such as Findagrave.com, Fulton County GIS data, the Georgia Department of Transportation’s list of cemeteries and Franklin Garrett’s cemetery surveys. We also pore through Fulton County death certificates and death extracts.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, after discovering the Akridge Family Cemetery on the west side and finding supporting documentation that there were burials there, I pulled on my boots to tromp through kudzu to find the site itself. I left the site with one primary question —  who is buried here?

None of the graves at the Akridge Family Cemetery are currently marked, and even when Franklin Garrett surveyed the cemetery nearly 100 years ago, there were only three marked graves belonging to Braxton, George, and James Miller. Only seven burials are listed on Findagrave.com, so that left about two dozen unknown burials.

To begin to discover who else might be buried in Akridge, I first looked for the original property owners and their children, limiting my search to deaths after 1855 since that’s when the Akridge family acquired the lot. Once I had that information, I searched online newspaper archives and GIS databases and pored over historical surveys, tax digests, census data, and marriage records to see what else I could learn.

According to Georgia marriage records, John Thomas Akridge married Martha Starns in 1847. They had had nine children (George, Mary, Jesse, William, Joel Simeon, James, Mattie/Tallulah, Emma, and Alice). Both John and Martha are both buried at the Akridge Family Cemetery.

According to death notices in the Atlanta Constitution and obituary abstracts, James, Joel, Jesse, Emma, Mattie, and William are all buried on-site as well. Mary and George are buried at Westview Cemetery.

Jesse’s death in 1876 was quite tragic, as he died at 21 after being stabbed to death by a close friend following a drunken tussle.

William and his wife Flora had a total of nine children together, three of whom died between 1900 and 1910. One of them, Fred, was accidently shot in 1909 according to an inquest documented in the Atlanta Constitution. He was buried at the family cemetery. The other two children are most likely buried there as well. William is buried at the site but Flora is not. As far as I can tell, none of William and Flora’s other children are buried at the Akridge Family Cemetery. Their eldest daughter Jessie’s oldest son Claud died at the age of 30 after complications from a concussion 15 years prior and is buried on site. Jessie’s daughter, Susie Culver, had a child George who died in infancy and is buried there as well.

Joel Simeon married Clara White in 1889. Joel died in 1900 and soon after, his sister Mary Lowe applied for guardianship of their two children, Elmer James and Percy L. Joel’s obituary does not list Clara as a surviving family member. No record of Clara’s death can be found. She is not listed in Franklin Garrett’s records of Indian Creek Cemetery, where her family is buried, so I believe she may be buried in the Akridge Family Cemetery as well. Percy died in 1918 and is buried at Akridge Family Cemetery. Elmer is buried in Texas.

James Akridge married Ella Adair in 1884. They had seven children.  Malcolm, Carl, and Henry are buried at the family cemetery. James was buried at the Akridge Family Cemetery in 1938, Ella, however, is buried at Westview.

Mattie Tallulah married John T Elliott in about 1883. They had eight children. It also appears that they were raising one child, Joel T, from John’s prior marriage to Annie Starnes. Most of Mattie and John’s children are buried at Westview and Greenwood Cemeteries. Census evidence shows that one of Mattie’s children did not survive to adulthood. Since Mattie and John were both later buried there, it is possible that this child is also buried at the Akridge Family Cemetery.

Alice married Cosby Burand in 1890 and had one child, Willie. She died in 1901. Cosby died in 1911, allegedly of accidental gas asphyxiation. They are both buried at Akridge Family Cemetery.

I can find little evidence of a Miller Family that is connected with the Akridges, leaving those burials a mystery. This brings the total of confirmed burials at the Akridge Family Cemetery up to 21, with three additional probable burials.

Even in densely populated urban areas, historic cemeteries can still be lost and forgotten. The Atlanta Cemetery Network’s primary goal is to encourage individuals to locate, research and document the lesser-known historic cemeteries in our community and to help revitalize these sites and provide readily available information on cemetery care and management.

Interested in helping to locate and preserve these historic Atlanta cemeteries? Findagrave.com, Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com are great places to start. And who knows — maybe you too can discover a fascinating and forgotten piece of Atlanta history.

 

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