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Our Monument to the Peelle Family

There were no plans in 1996 to openly celebrate our ancestors when I heard my Cousin and Reverend William Quick say "Those who don't remember their ancestors don't deserve to be remembered!"  Maybe something stuck from those words and as one gets older they have more meaning -- values in life do change!  Our research has progressed so well in documenting our Peelle heritage, that my brothers Marvin, George and I decided to share our heritage with others.  There are not many times in our lives that we, as children of our ancestors, ever really get a chance to show our respect for them.

We decided to build a monument and to erect it in the only place that made any sense -- "The Peele Cemetery" that our eighth generation Robert Peelle and his wife Mary Adams started in 1856.  This is a special cemetery to our family in that the location of the remains of the first seven generation ancestors are unknown and probably lost forever.  The reason for this assumption is that as early Quakers, their discipline did not openly advocate the marking of graves with modern style tombstones.  Rather, the old graves were often marked only with a large natural rock or a cedar tree planted at the head the person buried.  Then, once the younger generations died or moved, these graves often became lost, known only to God.

After some discussion, I decided that our monument had to be something special.  I designed it to have both a dedication paragraph and the pedigree of our first eleven generations inscribed upon it, through our Mother and Father.  We also needed a special date for its erection.  I decided to honor my deceased Father and have the monument erected on his next birthday on the 19th of March (his 108th) and to have the dedication ceremony on the next day, Friday, the 20th of March 1998.

Since we have such a proud heritage going back to our immigrant ancestor Lawrence Peelle who landed in Virginia in 1621, I wanted to register the monument with some of the prestigious heritage organizations. Can you guess which organizations eagerly assisted me in getting our monument registered?  And of course, the dedication ceremony program would have to be planned so that those who attended would never forget this special and once-in-a-lifetime occasion.  The Peele Cemetery is located in Scotland County but right on the South Carolina State Line.  For more information about the cemetery, including maps of its location, please select "Cemetery" from the Floating Menu on the left.

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