My family and relatives were in Franklin, N.Y., over Memorial Day weekend to attend a graveside memorial service for my two uncles who died ten weeks apart last fall. Both were Navy veterans. The Legion had placed flags on the graves of my uncles as well as my grandparents, who both served in World War I. After the service we decided to visit the graves of other ancestors who are buried in several of the other cemeteries in Franklin. My family has strong roots in this area going back to the late 1700s. We went to visit the grave of Dr. Solomon Wheat (picture) which is located in an abandoned cemetery on the edge of town. Dr. Wheat is my five-greats grandfather. He served as a surgeon in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. The cemetery is now on a tree-filled knoll in the middle of a farmer's field. To get to it we had to climb over a barbed-wire fence and walk through the field full of knee-high grass and trudge up the knoll. To our surprise, we found a Legion marker and flag next the headstone. Two other graves also had markers, even though the headstones were virtually unreadable and leaning at extreme angles. I expected that the location of the grave of a veteran of the Revolutionary War in an abandoned cemetery would not be known today. We were all pleasantly surprised. We are grateful to Post 1689 for remembering every veteran and making the difficult effort to mark his grave on Memorial Day.

Thank you,
Stuart Goodfellow,
Charlotte, NC