ATLANTA— What has to be one of the most commendable undertakings in the Vidalia area in a long time is the project of the Center United Methodist Church to mark the graves of all those currently unmarked in the church's cemetery.

Having already refurbished and substantially expanded its physical facilities, the church on State Highway 15 five miles south-southeast of Vidalia now has ongoing a campaign to establish the identities of the people buried in the dozen or so unmarked graves. The church has solicited the public's help through ads in this newspaper.

The expense of placing the markers, which will be pillow-style headstones of granit, is being borne by the church itself, with the cooperative assistance of Bill Clark of Clark and Shaw Monument Company, located a few miles away on Lyons-Center Road. The project is being financed, as were the church's recent physical improvements and expansions, through funds provided the church through the generoisty of the late Vidalia builder Lake McDonald.

Although Mr. McDonald's parents, grandparents and many of his other relatives are buried in the cemetery, he himself is not. His body was entombed in the new Lakeview Memorial Gardens mausoleum a mile farther south on Highway 15. He died October 31, 2005.

Pearl McDonald, widow of the church's benefactor, is spearheading the cemetery project. "We've had several calls, and we've already identified six of the graves," she said.

Mrs. McDonald said the church has added a good number of new members in recent months. "We're trying to get young people to carry on as old ones die out," she said.

I volunteered my genealogical (ahem) "expertise" and then solicited the help of fellow Vidalia native and genealogy buff John E. (Bo) Mosley of Macon. Between the two of us, through checking our records and the exchange of many e-mails, we came up with the full names of both the husband and the wife, including the wife's maiden name. We also were able to determine --- from a reverse projection of the ages shown for the couple in the 1910 census --- that the huband was born in either 1872 or 1873 and the wife in either 1873 or 1874.

(In such reverse projections, it is not possible to confirm the exact year of birth without knowing the person's birthday and determining whether it was before or after the date on which the censustaker made his visit to the family in the year of the census.)

None of the grandchildren knew if their grandparents died before or after 1919, when the State of Georgia began requiring death certificates. Bo and I knew that if it was after 1919, acquiring a copy of the death certificates at the state records office in Atlanta would have been an option.

But such a need never arose. For, lo and behold, one of the granddaughters was able to learn the exact dates of birth and death on her own. She did so by the simple expedient of paying a visit to the Toombs County courthouse, where the needed records happened to be available.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in announcing in early February that it planned to shrink its circulation area to exclude (among other areas) all of southern Georgia, said the effective date would be the end of March. But the date when deliveries of the paper to Vidalia actually ended was March 13.

I happened to be in Vidalia at the time, so I quickly telephoned my next-door neighbor in Atlanta to ask him to save his papers for me until I returned. (I feel that, sooner or later, I absolutely must see all issues of the AJC.)...

The predicament for other AJC junkies in Vidalia may not be as grim as at first feared. When The Macon Telegraph ended deliveries to Vidalia some six months earlier, the Fidalia library subscribed to the paper by mail and routinely receives it only one day late. The library's plan was to do the same with the Atlanta paper and hope it, too, would be delivered only one day late.

That would be a huge improvement over the five to six days usually required for me to receive The Advance in Atlanta.

E-mail: raytapley@juno.com

The Advance, Wednesday, April 11, 2007, page 5L.