Photos from Cobb Family Cemetery

Whenever I find photographs of the ancestors I have been researching, it feels as if a small window opens and gives me a glimpse of what they looked like at a particular moment in the past.

A distant cousin, Joyce Cobb Maness, who was kind enough to spend time talking with me on the phone recently, shared several photographs that opened one of those windows. They were taken at a place that has long fascinated me, the Cobb Family Cemetery in Haywood County, Tennessee. The cemetery is a small family burial ground near Poplar Corner Road, and online records identify it simply as Cobb Cemetery. Find a Grave currently lists it as having 36 memorials, while my own family research indicates there are other graves there are unmarked and unrecorded.

The entrance is directly across the road from the home of my second great-grandfather, Preston Brantley, and several of my Cobb and Brantley ancestors are buried there. According to my research, the cemetery is closely connected to John Hardy Cobb and appears to have become the family’s burial place after the Cobbs settled in Haywood County in 1834. That same research suggests the cemetery likely took on special importance after the deaths of Hardy Cobb’s young children and that the earliest burial there seems to have been his mother-in-law, Zilpha Castellaw, in 1842.

I have often read the document created by a small group of Cobb descendants on Aug. 21, 1986. In addition to cleaning up the old family cemetery, they formed a committee and established a fund to help ensure that it would be maintained well into the future. I have been grateful to that group each time I have visited the cemetery. In the document Joyce Cobb Maness prepared in 1986, the final line reads, “Pictures were taken of those who attended this meeting to be passed to future committees.” I am grateful to Joyce for sharing those photographs with me so I can post them here and add, in a small way, to the record of a cemetery that has preserved so much of my family’s history.