Hi everyone, Rutherford County is alive and almost well :) We're working on it. I just had an offer to go traipsing through a cemetery from a neat lady who emailed me. She even gave me her phone number!! (I'm gonna try to get her involved.) Rutherford is a large county and needs all the help it can get :) Without a doubt, my most memorable genealogical moment from the past year was the day I received the email about the "lost cemetery" out on the Smyrna Air base. My daughter, her six week old daughter (uhhuh..six weeks) and I jumped in our car and headed up to Smyrna to meet two of the nicest Tn National Guardsmen! Karl, the gentleman who had emailed me, told us to jump in his truck and we'd go to the cemetery. Well, for one thing...I'm only 5'1". I had to JUMP into this army-type truck! Why DO they make trucks so tall? Now Karl had warned us about "bumpy roads" before we left...but I figured they couldn't be THAT bad. On the three mile drive, through the woods, Karl had a great time going through as many ditches as he could find, as he told us the "road" had just been made the previous week. I think it was the most fun I've ever had without paying for it! It was tree to tree out there and not much else. Then we came to the opening of the cemetery. As I fell out of the truck <G>, I looked up and saw what appeared to be an old, long ago forgotten cemetery, sitting at the tip of a peninsula with water surrounding it on three sides. It had an almost surreal feel. There were prolly around 500 to 600 graves that were marked. There were many more that were simply indentations in the ground. I got as much info as I could...it was almost dark by then. One grave was an infant's....there was a baseball with a number on it, sitting in front of the grave. Karl told me the ball hadn't been there the day before and we all wondered how it had gotten there. It finally was too dark to even look anymore, so we headed back to the truck. On the way, we closed the old fence, made by slave labor in the 1800s. It was one of the most amazing things I've even seen. I felt as if I had been given the opportunity to look through the eyes of the past. I'm making plans to go back out with as many ppl as I can gather to photograph and get information. Some of the areas leading families are buried there. I've seen queries about many of these souls. It will take alot of work to clear the cemetery of weeds, but that's half the fun :) I'm already copying old Rutherford Co. censuses, from 1810 on up, and hope to have them online asap. I would also like to re-do what I re-did when I took the page last fall. I really just threw it up there and hoped it would fly. I've been looking at other TnGenWeb pages and have gotten some ideas that would make the Rutherford page more easily accessable. I'm still very new at this, but this year will see ALOT more NEW info for Rutherford County! Thank you so much to everyone who has helped me. Mari Byers Rutherford Co., Tn.