She has a passion for the dead — and bringing them to life

Three miles south of Fair Park sits Oakland Cemetery, the final resting place of some of the city’s most recognizable names — Grauwyler, Samuell, Minyard, Zang and many others.

Marcia Smith isn’t interested in any of them.

Instead, the former newspaper writer turned high school teacher turned genealogist is piecing together the lives of the more ordinary people who lived in Dallas — some buried as long ago as 1895, others as recently as 1997. She began chronicling Oakland’s dead in 2020, and posts her findings in story form at marciasmith.medium.com.

Smith, 71, has lived in Dallas for 47 years. She worked as a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, earned a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas and then taught journalism and literature at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Oakland Cemetery, which opened in 1891, closed temporarily in 2019 when funds dried up. A nonprofit now manages restoration and maintenance, and the cemetery received state historical designation this year.

The Dallas Morning News sat down with Smith recently to talk about her work. The following interview has been edited for clarity.

How did you get interested in writing about people who are so long gone?

I was born in Nashville, and both my parents grew up in a little town not too far from there, Lafayette, Tenn. No matter where we lived, we would eventually go to that little town, especially for Decoration Day.

You go in the spring, and you would bring flowers to your loved ones’ graves. It was a very big deal. My granny would go, my aunt would go, my mom, dad, my brother, me, you’d get a new dress. It was like Easter or something. You’d just be real decked out. And then you would stand by your grandpa’s grave or your uncle’s grave, and you put flowers on them, and there’d be a picnic. That was a really big deal. So I have that Southern bent toward ancestor worship.

And as an adult, when I would go see my mother, we would drive down to Tennessee and go to those cemeteries. I started visiting my Aunt Sarah in Nashville. She had started doing genealogy and she talked to me about it, and I thought, “Well, I think I’d like to do this.”

Why Oakland Cemetery?

I got tired of writing about my own family. I had read an article in the Morning News about the cemetery struggling and it just broke my heart. So I thought, well, this cemetery sounds really interesting. I’d like to go there. And I wasn’t interested at all in the famous people who were there.

There are more than 27,000 people buried at Oakland. How do you choose who to write about?

I just find a name. I’d say everybody’s got a story. I want to see what that person’s story is. I wanted to tell women’s stories more than I wanted to tell men’s stories. I’m a feminist, and I’ve always loved women’s history, and I think a lot of women’s stories aren’t told.

How do you reconstruct their lives?

I have a subscription to ancestry.com and to newspapers.com. And I often go to The Dallas Morning News archive through the Dallas Public Library, and The Portal to Texas History. Find a Grave can be helpful. I use the census, yearbooks, interment cards, draft registration cards, birth, marriage and death records, immigration records, voter lists. It’s fun. It’s a puzzle.

Many of your stories are about women and you have written that women are harder to research than men. Tell me about that.

They didn’t work in the olden days. You’re not as apt to find anything in the newspaper about them that isn’t something like they’re engaged or they got married. They weren’t doers, movers and shakers, so they don’t have newspaper articles written about them. When you look at an old census, there’s going to be the father first, the man first, and his occupation and years of schooling and then there’s going to be the mom and all the children. So that’s what you find, first the men.

You said you don’t write about famous people. Tell me about the servant’s gravestone in the Samuell family plot, who died in 1919.

Nannie Roy. The story there was that she was buried with the Samuells even though she was officially Black, and that was unusual. She was half white, I discovered. That may have been one of the reasons that they allowed her to be buried there. I couldn’t find anything about her for ages. And then somehow I discovered that some woman in the Samuell family had written a book about the family.

I asked the Dallas Public Library where I might find it, and they found a copy of it for me. And there was some information about Nannie Roy in that book, and that was the find of my life, because that’s why I could write about her. The spelling on the grave marker doesn’t match what’s on her interment card, which is not unusual.

What is your best-read story?

The best-read of my stories is one called Orphan Till. Somebody posted this photograph on the Friends of Oakland Cemetery Dallas Facebook page. It was so poignant to me, a young father. These were all his children and the baby, and they lost their mother, young. Her name was Vada. She was 35. I wrote what I could find about her. But then I thought, well, I want to know about him, the father who had to raise these seven kids. And then I thought, well, I want to know about what happened to all the kids without their mother. And so I did all the kids. So it went on and on and on, because I just wanted to know for myself what became of all these people. And then it turned out she was actually buried in the old Mt. Auburn Cemetery, just next to Oakland.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Sometimes people ask me, isn’t it depressing? No. These are people’s lives I write about. I don’t focus on their deaths. As a journalist, writing about live people gets you in trouble. They don’t like what you say, how you’ve quoted them, or they don’t like the picture they took, or they’ve got some complaint about something.

These people never complain.