Preserving history and the legacy of our ancestors sometimes goes beyond traditional means. A simple act of service, like cleaning off a gravesite, can hold more significance than you think. For the members of New Mount Rose Baptist Church and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this is an ongoing mission.
On Juneteenth weekend, volunteers worked together at a historic cemetery in Tarrant County to mark and record headstones to create a more accurate record of who has been buried there and which graves need some TLC. The initiative, “Digging for Dignity,” is part of a greater effort to memorialize the members of the Black community who are no longer with us.
Of those buried in Fretwell-New Trinity Cemetery at Haltom City’s People’s Memorial Burial Park, some were known to have been business owners, military veterans, preachers, pioneers, teachers, and formerly enslaved individuals. 7,700 souls have been buried there over the last 140 years.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s Dr. Spencer Smith helped organize the event and gather the 200 volunteers who helped log information for findagrave.com. Dr. Smith told CBS News Texas, “I think it’s pretty huge. This cemetery, due to a lot of issues, including the legal title to the land, became really neglected for several decades, and it became very overgrown with brush. You couldn’t just walk through and look for [headstones]. Plus, the plot map wasn’t readily available.”
The group worked sector by sector to check the entire cemetery
To help make it easier for the 200 volunteers to log every headstone at the historic cemetery, the area was divided into 29 separate sectors by the event’s organizers. From there, each volunteer was tasked with making sure every headstone was looked at to determine if it was intact. Apparently, only 30% of the graves at Fretwell-New Trinity Cemetery are still legible. Some have even sunken into the earth over time.
Ruth “Cookie” Baker spoke with CBS News Texas at the “Digging for Dignity” event and told reporters that dozens of members of her family had been buried at the cemetery, making things even more poignant for her. Baker said, “It’s not only Black history, it’s the history of our country that we revere, those who worked, but those who came before us, that their contribution is not lost. It is not lost on us how much time and energy they put into this country being so great.”
How to get involved
If you’d like to aid in New Mount Rose Baptist Church’s efforts to preserve the Fretwell-New Trinity Cemetery and honor those who have been buried there, every month the church will be hosting a day of service at the historic site. Volunteers are always needed—to express interest and learn more information, please contact the church directly at 817-923-1265 or via email at newmtrosembc@gmail.com.
Upcoming events are also posted on the group’s Facebook page, which you can access here.
This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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