Finding Alfred and Sarah Doss

A few years ago, I was doing some genealogy research and came across an interesting photograph from the November 25, 1965 Wise County (Texas) Messenger that showed my great-great grandfather's headstone. The photo got me interested in trying to find his and my great-great grandmother's gravesites and maybe do a little maintenance on them while I was there. But first, I'd have to find the Oak Grove Cemetery just north of Decatur, Texas, where they were buried.

They had originally settled in Collin County, Texas in the mid-1800s after they left Kentucky as part of the migration of Midwesterners to Texas. But within a couple of years of settling in as tenant farmers there, the Civil War started, and my great-great grandfather ended up in the Confederate army as a private in a cavalry unit. He returned home destitute at the end of the war and moved his family to a farm near Dallas, looking for a better future, still farming someone else's land. Finally, he ended up in the Decatur area, west of Dallas. Land records I've found show that he never owned land until his later years when his children, their mother having already passed away, pooled their money to buy him some farmland, not far from where he's now buried.

As I tried to find the cemetery where they were buried, the challenge was that it was located on the grounds of the old Oak Grove United Methodist Church, which is no longer there. The cemetery is now on a private ranch, but I didn't have the precise location of the burial site.

I was able to get some help figuring out the cemetery's approximate location from the church's pastor a couple of years ago. The church today is located about 4 miles south of the original church. Then, I contacted the owner of the property. The owner was very helpful in pinpointing the location of the cemetery and giving me the green light to enter and do what I needed to do.

Finally, I set a date to go, made my hotel reservation, and drove to Decatur. Of course, it rained the first day I was there, so instead of going to the cemetery, I drove to Clarendon, Texas to visit my great grandfather's gravesite and the gravesites of my grandfather's first wife who died of a post-partum infection and their two-year old daughter who died of pneumonia and meningitis. Life was hard in those days.

It rained again the second day, but I decided to just work through it.

I remembered from a photograph of the cemetery I had seen that there was a chain link fence around the cemetery, so when I got close, I looked for and found the fence. I looked over the fence and saw a couple of headstones among the prairie grass and briars, so I walked the outside perimeter and found the gate.

Inside, I found some headstones in the open, but there were also some in the trees that had grown up there over the past 100 years. Walking to every stone I could find, I tried to read the inscriptions, but none belonged to my ancestors. Some of the inscriptions were faded, so I started to wonder if theirs had faded too. I also saw that nearly every headstone was broken, I assume from storms and falling limbs, so finding a headstone that matched the profile I had seen in the newspaper article wasn't working.

I had walked practically the entire inside perimeter along the fence, almost back to where I started, when I saw a headstone in the briars and vines and thought I could make out the name "Sarah." Sarah was my great-great grandmother's name. I looked through the black grime that coated the headstone and saw that it was hers. Looking around, I made out another headstone to its left, pulled the growth away, and saw that it was my great-great grandfather's. Beside them were the headstones of two of their grandchildren, one who had died at the age of 3 and another who died at the age of 23.

I cleared the growth and cleaned their headstones as much as I could, then cleared weeds away from the other headstones in the cemetery.

Once I was finished, I spent a few quiet moments with them as the rain continued to fall. It was a fulfilling day, well worth the trip.