The day my mother and I planned to visit the grave of Martin Chapin started off dreary. I checked the weather forecast to see if the afternoon would get better, and of course it was 100% chance of rain. But it was the last day left open for cemetery exploring before I had to leave my mother's house in South Carolina and return home to Pennsylvania, so we set off anyway. It was just rain...

Of course by the time we found Summer Family Cemetery #1 down a tiny dirt path edged in magnolia trees outside of Pomaria, Newberry County it was pouring. But the cemetery was absolutely worth it. We have no ancestors buried there - this visit was part of a Monuments and Memorials lesson that my mother is developing with students and teachers at Chapin Middle School - but the cemetery was just...cool. Absolutely beautiful, in fact. A neat wrought iron fence surrounded the plot, buried deep in the woods. The ground was littered with pinestraw and magnolia seed pods, so at least we didn't have to contend too much with the thick red mud so prevalent in that part of the state. And the towering trees offered at least a little relief from the pouring rain.

The tombstones were interesting as well, representing a broad span of years, styles, symbols and history. But the ornate metal gate was really what sparked my Mom's interest. It was pretty fancy and probably awfully expensive for a small family cemetery, although the Chapins and the Summers were fairly well-to-do. A date on the gate - 1859 - seems to support my Mom's theory that Martin Chapin -- for whom the town of Chapin, SC, was named -- donated the fence in memory of his son who died at the age of four in 1856. Upon further perusal, my Mom noticed the names "Weeman" and "Boston" at the bottom of the gate. At her request I did some digging in online historic newspapers to try and find an advertisement for the fence/gate, which turned up an interesting notice on GenealogyBank from the Boston Evening Transcript that stated that Ebenezer Weeman had received a patent for a "metallic gate" on 16 September 1851. Armed with the date, I searched the US Patent and Trademark Office online database of historic patents and was delighted to find a copy of that patent - complete with a sketch of the very gate design that graces the Summer Family Cemetery in Newberry County, South Carolina.

The patent discovery tells us little about the people buried there, but does provide an interesting look back at the history of that neat old cemetery -- one of those "Wow, that's really cool" type of discoveries. That's what family history is all about - starting with the names and dates and then digging further, into the details that help us piece together the interesting stories that turn a family tree into family history.