Sign up for Genealogy Pointers »

Colleton County, South Carolina, situated in the south central portion of the state, was created from Charleston District in 1798. One of the original three counties in South Carolina, Colleton, or at least the upper reaches, is the subject of this prodigious effort to provide access to the county's tombstone inscriptions. In all, the compilers have uncovered the identities of 12,000 persons named on tombstones throughout the county--any one of whom is easily found in the complete name index at the back of the volume.

But there is more to Cemeteries of Upper Colleton County, South Carolina than meets the eye. Besides the contents of the tombstones--name of deceased, dates of birth and death, marital status, and sometimes date married, military service, and so on--the Bryans have prepared maps, photographs, and narrative descriptions of the cemeteries they visited, and they have grouped them into six geographical clusters so that researchers might find it easier to discover the tombstones on a visit to the cemetery. In a number of instances the compilers have also prepared histories of churches associated with the cemeteries, as well as brief genealogical essays on deceased members of the following families that had been known to them: Black, Breland, Carter, Fisk, Garris, Goodwin, Hiers, Kicklighter, Kinsey, May, Murdaugh, Padgett, Risher, Rizer, Smith, Smoak, Smyly, Stokes, Ulmer, Varn, Walker, and Williams. Finally, appended to the body of the work are various alphabetical lists of upper Colleton County veterans, patriots, and members of fraternal organizations whose death records appear earlier in the book.