"Hello Wendy,

It was quite an honor to be able to restore the cemetery. I vividly remember visiting it as a child when our family would return to Gallatin to see my aunts, uncles and cousins. Even then, many of the tombstones were difficult to read, but dad always showed me the tombstones for my second-great and third-great-grandfathers. When I got interested in genealogy as a middle aged adult, I returned to Gallatin to transcribe the cemetery fully, only to find out that some were simply illegible. I had no idea that others were buried.

I spoke with my sister about it, who lives in Franklin, TN, and she had a friend at her church who was a budding archeologist. I guess it isn't a very lucrative field financially, because when she told him about it, he offered to get some fellow archeologists together and work on it in their spare time, mostly on free weekends. They charged me an hourly rate and took almost three months to finish the work. My sister, Sarah, helped coordinate that part. I then wanted to put up a fence to protect the cemetery from the cattle kept in the pasture and that led to me getting the help of Mary Bright, a second cousin who lives in Gallatin, to coordinate bids and oversee the construction of the fence. The property owner, Mr. Cantrell, was gracious enough to allow us to build the new fence outside the perimeter of the old fence, so that the restored tombstones were never in danger during the new fence construction. Once the new fence was up, the old barbed wire fence was removed. Robert Baulch, another second cousin, contributed $5,000 to the project, and I paid for the rest, a little over $15,000. If you decide to do this for some of your family cemeteries, it wouldn't have to be that expensive. The biggest cost was the fence. As you can see from the photos, we didn't scrimp on cost there. I wanted to be absolutely certain that the cemetery would be preserved.

No, I haven't posted the photos on findagrave, but I have no problem with you taking them from my page. You have my perm...http://www.baulch.us/Stone-BaulchCemetery.html