Finding Grandpa
For a few years now I have been somewhat interested in my heritage but the one who got me more involved was my little sister Vickie. She assumed that since I was retired I would have time to go to Nashville and help her track down the graves of our Great Grand Father Sam Riggan , his two wives and infant daughter .
Mar. 12, 1897 Grandpa Sam married Sophia Jolly who was four years his senior, they had no children. She passed away Jan. 19, 1944 and was buried in the same plot as Grandma Molly and Nina . When Grandpa Sam died he joined his two wives and daughter .
Knowing that we have deceased relatives from the past is not enough for Vickie. She needs visual proof of their existence. Running around in old graveyards was not and still isn't on my bucket list but what the hell else is there for a newly retired guy to do. So off I go to Nashville. Vickie also recruited her good friend Brenda Baird to help us in our quest although Brenda being an accomplished genealogist in her own right didn't require any arm twisting .
Vickie and Brenda were at a stand still. They had found out the above information and found out that the grave site was located in the Lagardo area of Wilson County, Tn. Beyond that they were stumped .
The first place we stopped was the library in Mt. Juliet. Vickie had previously found a family history written by a Great Aunt Marget Ballinger Sullivan. I really had no idea I even had a Great Aunt living in Mt Juliet and was even more surprised to find out I went to school with her son Shelby and never knew he was my cousin. He was a couple of years behind me and we traveled in different circles .
The next place we went was the public library in Lebanon. We prowled through old census books, books that recorded land transactions, and they even had books that listed every graveyard in the state as well as the people who were buried in them. We found where Grandpa Sam and his wife Sophia were involved in several instances of buying and selling land in the Lagardo and Martha communities but we couldn't locate the grave site .
While we were in the area we visited a cemetery where one of Grandpa Riggan's brothers was buried and then stopped in Martha to visit the graves of Grandpa and Granny Riggan. I was a young teenager when Grandpa died and in my mid twenties when Granny passed. This is the first time in more than forty years that I am looking down on their tombstones and I conjure up memories of the happy times I had as a kid following an old man thru the fields and seeing the worried look on Granny's face when I walked out the door .
It wasn't that we didn't know where Grandpa Sam was buried - we knew he was buried in the Old Lagardo cemetery in Lagardo but Vickie and Brenda had not been able to find said cemetery in print or person. I, being older and having a longer memory and having spent more time in Lagardo while growing up, determined they were looking in the wrong places so off we go on a road trip.
I took them down several roads they had not known about because Vickie was just a baby when Dad stopped going to Lagardo after his Dad passed away. We located and tromped around several graveyards to no avail. Vickie and I spent almost a whole day roaming the cemeteries of Lagardo. Suprisingly there were quite a few. Every family seemed to have it's own place for the soul to rest for eternity .
The next stop was the State Archives in Lebanon . They had even more books containing more graveyards and census information but they still couldn't give us the location of Grandpa Sam's grave. Anything you would ever want to know about Wilson County, Tn. from the date white men first set foot there can be found in the archives.
During all of this searching it was discovered that Grandpa Sam was a business man who owned a general store and he bought and sold tracts of land from time to time. I suspect that he was in a position to acquire land from his customers thru business dealings. Many farmers back then would mortgage their crops or land for seed, grain, and fertilizer. The merchants who supplied the items would take a note against property for merchandise. Somewhere along the way we found out that Grandpa Sam was big in the local Baptist church and he may not have gotten along with his son, my grandfather, because he may have been somewhat of a womanizer. All of this was great information but it still didn't help us find his grave.
Vickie and Brenda had to take care of other things and I wound up heading off on my own. I started at the State Archives. The lady there was very helpful and she pulled several books about graveyards from the shelf. We had already gone thru a couple of them but we were trying to find a different approach.
One thing that we had wanted was a copy of Grandpa Sam's obituary. Turns out there was only one newspaper printed in Wilson County back in 1947 and it was bi-weekly. In other words, by the time the obit was published Grandpa had been buried for some time. Thank goodness for word of mouth. According to the obit Grandpa Sam was buried in Bloodworth / Thompson cemetery which was totally different from previous knowledge. Now we are getting somewhere. This new information led us to a book listing all of the graveyards in Wilson County and sure enough there was Grandpa Sam. I was even able to obtain a general area to look in so off I went .
Low and behold I found another graveyard or two we had not known about but they were not the one I was looking for. While driving around I saw a woman on a riding lawn mower and stopped to ask her for directions. She brought out her mother who had only lived in the area for about 25 years, she in turn told me to go down the road to the little white house and if there was a car in the drive I should stop and ask for Miss Ann.
Miss Ann as it turned out, was a the find of the century. The house she lived in was the one she was born in some seventy odd years before. It took me a few minutes to convince her I was not some con artist and then she started telling me how she knew of my grandparents, aunts and uncles. She remembered Uncle Ray coming home from the war with wounds . She was friends with and went to school with an older cousin, and, yes, she knew where the graveyard was located but she would have to take me to it or I would never find it .
I got in the car with Miss Ann and her cousin. She was right about being hard to find. The graveyard was located just off Hwy 109 behind an equipment barn. There were the grave stones - worn and broken. Miss Ann drove me around the area. Her knowledge of the area and the people brought back memories long forgotten. She was kind enough to allow me to return the next day with Vickie and Brenda. She was a wealth of knowledge and a delight to talk with.
I took Vicky and Brenda to the grave so they could see for themselves. With a little help from some shaving cream we were able to bring up the carving on the stones and take pictures.
So there you have it - Grandpa Sam, Grandma Molly, Grandma Sophia, and Nina are no longer lost. Another page in the history of the Riggan family is written, and I can now include grave locator on my resume. I have to admit I had a good time, but I think this was more a case of the blind squirrel finding the occasional nut.
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