The Southern Railway was the product of nearly 150 predecessor lines that were combined, reorganized and recombined beginning in the 1830s, formally becoming the Southern Railway in 1894. By the end of steam the Southern Railway had grown to over 8,000 miles of line. It controlled several other railroads which included among many others the Alabama Great Southern Railroad.
The Alabama Great Southern Railroad operated in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. It ran southwest from Chattanooga where it connects with the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific Railway to New Orleans through Birmingham and Meridian.
My great-grandfather, Henry Marvin Smitherman, was an engineer on the Alabama Great Southern Railroad. While he died many years before I was born, my great-grandmother Nora lived until I was nearly a teenager, so I remember her fairly well. She lived "way out in the country" near Vance, which seemed an epically long drive from Tuscaloosa when I was a boy, but is really not that far at all. When I was little, Grandmother Smitherman had farm animals, which were quite interesting to a young city boy like me. I have often heard the story of me as a youngster stepping outside the back door during a visit and hearing one of those animals call out and asking "Mama, does Grandmother have elephants?!" Turns I had mistaken the crowing of a rooster for a much larger animal.
Marvin and Nora had eight children - Lorraine, Mary, Marvin, Albert, Jacquelyn (my grandmother), Anne, Sam, and Robert. My great uncle Sam lived with Grandmother and Granddaddy their whole lives, and then continued to live in their house after they died. Sam passed away recently, and I visited this cemetery again today to serve as a pallbearer for his burial. Seeing that this vast cemetery had only one geocache, I thought it would be nice to remember all of them with a multicache hide of my own. Besides thinking about them, I'm sure it will also afford me time to visit them here again when I do maintenance in the future.
To locate the final, gather information from the grave markers for Henry Marvin and Nora Ray Smitherman:
N33 29.ABC
W86 50.DEF
A = On Nora's marker, third digit in the year that she was born
B = On Marvin's marker, the last digit in the year that he was born
C = On Marvin's marker, the last digit in the year of his death
D = On Nora's marker, the first digit in the date of her death
E = On Nora's marker, last digit in the year of her death
F = The total number of Marvin and Nora's children