Let me tell you about a girl named Lena Tomlin.
Lena holds a special place in my heart because of her headstone. She is the spark of inspiration for me to start this blog, and she is how I came up with my tagline, “every burial is a story.” I discovered her name while doing research for the Green Street Cemetery in Statesville, North Carolina. My library recently used grant funds to conduct a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the oldest public African American burial ground in the city (additional resources and background on this project are available at the links below). While preparing a program about the cemetery project for Black History Month this year, I used Lena’s name as an example to show the importance of the WPA survey. This survey was conducted in 1939 and it was designed to record the names and dates on existing headstones. The worker who catalogued Green Street (recorded as Greenwood) Cemetery, unfortunately, only recorded 72 stones. We know there were more than that because the cemetery was almost full by 1939, but the worker only recorded stones up to 1912. The stone for Lena Tomlin (1881-1899) is among those recorded.
The reason I used her name as an example was because by February 2023, when my program took place, her stone had since disappeared. It had either broken or was vandalized, and the stone was either buried or had been stolen. Being born in 1881, Lena was not recorded in the 1880 census. Having passed away in 1899, she is not on the 1900 census. Most genealogists know that the 1890 census basically doesn’t exist because it was mostly destroyed by fire in 1921. Death certificates in North Carolina were not required by law until 1913, and death announcements and obituaries were rare for African Americans at that time. The stone which was recorded in 1939 was the only document we had that proved Lena ever existed. I explained at my program that now, unfortunately, her stone is gone but the WPA survey lives on, preserving important information that, even though carved in stone, can still be lost over time.
In April 2023, following the first phase of the GPR survey at Green Street, I was part of a three-person team who went out and probed areas where the surveyor had seen an anomaly on the sonar, indicating a possible buried headstone. One of the areas we probed resulted in the uncovering of Lena’s stone. I was so excited, I cried. Who knows when between 1939 and 2023 the stone had broken off and become buried, but for the first time in probably decades, this stone was seeing the light of day again.
Lena Tomlin was an African American teenage female. All those demographics would have been working against her at the end of the 19th century. A story like hers could easily have been forgotten, but I could not let that happen, especially not now that I had found her stone. Several months later after the GPR project, I had the pleasure of meeting (via phone) Lisa Henderson of Wilson, North Carolina. She has been instrumental in the cleaning and preserving of the Odd Fellows cemetery which is adjacent to two other African American cemeteries in Wilson. I came across a blog post she had written praising the Green Street project and making personal connections to some of those buried there. I was so excited to hear that she was a descendant of some of those buried at Green Street that I reached out to see if she had any photographs of her ancestors. She did! She had some incredible photos of her ancestors working in their barber shop in Statesville sometime around 1918-1919. She provided pictures of the beautiful women in her family. Putting faces to the names of those in Green Street was an emotional and moving part of the project that we hadn’t anticipated.
Lisa also connected me with other blog posts she had done of her family research. She showed me a newspaper article that had Lena’s name mentioned. She had evidently been present during a crime where a man was murdered. She and her father attempted to heal the man, but he passed. This incident occurred the year before her death. I couldn’t help but think of a scared teenager shaking as she helped her father try to save a man’s life. Her parents and grandparents were born into slavery and lived without freedom until the end of the Civil War. Lena lived in the heart of the African American community which was rallying and building their futures in the early days of independence. Her community witnessed the end of slavery and the establishment of their right to marry and vote, only to have the voting right taken away during a wave of white supremacist movement at the turn of the century. Lena’s siblings and cousins lived through the first world war, the Great Depression, and World War II. Lena’s life was cut way too short, and she was only part of this community for a glimpse of time, but her newly discovered stone is a testament to her and her family’s hardships and resilience.
When I say, “Every burial is a story,” I’m not being dramatic. Every burial, whether marked or unmarked, is someone’s mother, father, child, sibling, friend. Every burial is a person. Every person deserves to have their story told. I am honored to be able to tell Lena Tomlin’s story.
Additional Green Street resources:
https://statesville.com/news/local/green-street-cemetery-project-discovering-untold-stories/article_f2fed6f0-d630-11ed-ac53-67ba9dd3bfdf.html
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/04/17/burials-being-recognized-at-sacred-black-cemetery-
https://www.iredellfreenews.com/perspectives/2023/viewpoint-recognizing-the-historical-significance-of-the-green-street-cemetery/
https://www.qcnews.com/news/u-s/north-carolina/iredell-county/up-to-2000-unmarked-graves-uncovered-in-statesville/
https://www.iredellfreenews.com/news-features/2023/viewpoint-green-street-cemetery-project-casts-light-on-statesville-history/
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