New Rose Hill registry helps Maconites trace lineage

Two Macon natives, Kathleen O’Neal and Liz Riley, are shedding light on the everyday people buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, a 50-acre site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

O’Neal is a historian, and Riley has a background in information technology. They have teamed up to document and catalog each grave in a database accessible to the public.

Both women have generations of family buried in Rose Hill and frequently visit the walkable cemetery located on Riverside Drive. O’Neal has led the Historic Macon Foundation’s Rose Hill Ramble tours for the past two years and knows many of the stories behind the headstones. 

The 150-year-old cemetery is the final resting place for many notable Maconites and historically significant figures, including music icons Duane Allman and Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers Band. Thousands of individuals are buried on the cemetery’s grounds.

“This is an enormous amount of history that needs to be recorded,” Riley said.

Their efforts are a race against time as weeds take over the land and aging headstones deteriorate. The last official map of Rose Hill, containing numbered plots, came from the city’s engineering office in 1959. 

Records are outdated and incomplete, O’Neal said. She called the existing documentation a “mishmash” of information available in the form of books, publications and government records. 

Rose Hill has 16,000 recorded burials. The cemetery is divided into 2,500 plots, or parcels of ground that can hold multiple burials. That number does not include sections that remain unplotted.

O’Neal’s husband, a surveyor, created a map of the cemetery that organizes the plots into nine grids. O’Neal and Riley visit each grave with a pen and a sheet of paper, documenting the name, location, dates and military information contained on each headstone. 

O’Neal carries a pair of pruners for when she needs to cut through a tangle of weeds to read the faded engravings on certain memorials.

The process can be tricky when the number of graves in a plot don’t match existing documentation or when records contain misspelled names and incorrect dates. They must also document any graves not previously recorded.

“We’re writing down and starting an inventory of all of these monuments — before they fade away,” O’Neal said. 

She keeps a separate record of the companies that produced each marker. Some gravestones were made by the Artope family of Macon, who once owned a marble business located at Plum and Third streets.

There’s even a monument in Rose Hill made by Tiffany & Co. — one of just three of the luxury jewelry house’s monuments in Georgia, O’Neal and Riley noted.

“The symbolism on these monuments is incredible,” Riley said. 

The stone designs aren’t just aesthetic. They often hold a deeper meaning. A flying hourglass represents how time flies, and a pair of carved hands reach up to heaven. 

O’Neal and Riley also trace the history of those buried in the cemetery through newspaper clippings and census records. O’Neal traced an engraved bench placed in memory of a man lost at sea in 2007 to a matching monument in a Rhode Island state park — where the man lived before his disappearance.

The two even created a Facebook group to document and keep these stories alive.

They began their work in March and have cataloged 600 plots so far. O’Neal and Riley said they expect the project to take another year.

Visitors frequently mistake the pair — donning brightly colored vests with notebooks, flashlights and gardening tools in hand — for cemetery employees and ask for directions to a specific grave. 

“What good is it knowing that they’re in here if you can’t find them?” O’Neal said, noting the importance of remembering and honoring the thousands of stories buried within the cemetery.