The original part of the Summerville Cemetery is about an acre of grassy space with just a few grave markers.
And since the city of Summerville took over the cemetery earlier this year, an effort has been made to organize the cemetery’s records and find out what was in that open space.
“We didn’t know what we were going to find,” Gene McGinnis, president of the Chattooga County Historical Society, said in a phone call, but organizers knew many of the city’s earliest residents were buried there.
The historical society brought in Randy Brennan, who uses ground-penetrating radar to discover lost grave sites, McGinnis said. In July, Brennan visited Summerville and found about 640 unmarked grave sites in the grassy open spaces of Summerville Cemetery.