The land along the branch of the Rappahannock River known as Carter's Run in Northern Virginia has a significant place in the early history of the Cockrill family.

From ANDERSON, COCKRILL, MOFFETT, SMITH & Allied Families of Northern Virginia -- VOLUME 1: Cockrill Families of Northern Virginia, by James A. Burgess (James A. Burgess, Arizona: 2002), Chapter 7, "Thomas Cockrell and Leticia Bailey, pp. 113-114:

The Heflin Moffett cemetery is on a small hill located 2.1 miles north on Route 689 on the left or west side of the road. It is located on the old Allison Farm 6266 Carter's Run Road...

I believe that Thomas COCKRELL was born and raised on or near Chimney Stone Branch, Carter's Run near the Heflin Moffett Cemetery. Because his great Uncle Jess MOFFETT was buried there I believe that most of the rest of the family is also there. This must have been a beautiful area in which to raise a family, attend church, work and live. They were religious people belonging to the Enon Old School Baptist Church. Thomas COCKRELL and Lettetia BAILEY were not rich in earthly blessings, but I feel that they lived a good life on Carter Run, Fauquier County, Virginia.

In 1976 I visited Carter's Run looking for the Heflin Moffett Cemetery with my son James David BURGESS who was three years old at the time. We had been driving around for quite a while when I realized that we would soon need to fill our car with gasoline. At that point I began to be interested in finding a gas station, it was a long distance back to Warrenton. Suddenly I heard someone mowing their yard and drove up to a young man who sold me some gasoline. I asked him where the Heflin Moffett Cemetery was located. He pointed up the road to a small tree on the hill side. I had driven by the location several times but could not see tombstones in the Cemetery. As we walked into the cemetery I quickly found the large marker for Jesse MOFFETT, so I knew I was in the right location.

We were fortunate that the cemetery had been cleaned that spring, so the weeds and grass were not real high. After hunting for about an hour I was ready to leave, when all of the sudden, Jimmy fell down and was crying. I went over and picked him up and found that he was lying on the tombstone of Thomas COCKRELL. Just a clue that their markers are real close to the dirt road that goes past the cemetery...

I last visited the cemetery in September 1995 with Larry FRANCIS. My heart tells me that this was the area where our ancestors lived and settled in Fauquier County, Virginia...

From Fauquier County, Virginia Tombstone Inscriptions, by Nancy Chappeler Baird (1970), p. 55:

HEFLIN - MOFFETT CEMETERY, Marshall, Va.

Located on left of Rt. 691 2.1 mi. N of Rt. 689.

Some unfenced graves and two iron fenced sections in open field near road.

Thomas COCKRILL / Born / Mar. 22, 1822 / Died / Jan. 1, 1885

Mrs. Letitia COCKRILL / daughter of Henry E. & / Nancy Alice BAILEY /

Born Mar. 12, 1826 / Died / December 20, 1895

Jessie MOFFETT / Mar 24, 1798 / June 10, 1880 / wives / Elizabeth HITT /

Martha RYAN / Oct. 29, 1817 Feb. 18, 1889

Jessie MOFFETT / Mar. 2, 1759 Aug. 31, 1832 / wife Elizabeth SCOTT

Captain Lawson Alex. HEFLIN / son of Wm. & Lucy HEFLIN / Born June 25,

1804 /Died Jan. 15, 1877

Murray J. / son of / J. M. & A. A. / HEFLIN / Born July 3, 1888 / Died July

15, 1888

Footstones: L. F. H. ; J. L. H.

Rozier L. / son of / J. M. & A. A. / HEFLIN / Born Jan 3, 1898 / Died /

Jan. 10, 1898

Florrie T. / daughter of / J. M. & A. A. / HEFLIN / Born July 3, 1882 / Died

April 4, 1902

Robert F. HEFLIN / Born Dec. 10, 1844 / Died Jan. 1, 1922 / Member of Mosby's

Command / 43rd Battalian Virginia Cavalry / He was a devoted husband and /

a faithful member of Enon Baptist Church.

Tabitha HEFLIN / Daughter of / Jas. & Frances HILL / wife of B. J. HANBACK

& Robert HEFLIN / Born April 1, 1848 / Died Dec. 17, 1919

Jos. WELCH / Oct. 18, 1833 Dec. 6, 1907 / his wife / Sallie / Mar. 10, 1855 /

Oct. 12, 1915

In October of 2004, I unexpectedly passed through Fauquier County for a day. Remembering the significance of the county and particularly Carter's Run and the Heflin-Moffett cemetery to Jim Burgess' research of the Cockrill family, I thought of taking advantage of this opportunity and drop by for a look, even though I was not well prepared. My traveling buddy indulged my request for a quick visit first to the Fauquier County Library in Warrenton, where a helpful librarian directed me to the "Virginiana Room" which contains their local history files and books. Spending a week in such a place would have been nice, but I only had time to check out the cemetery inscriptions, a map of cemetery locations, and a couple of other things before we had to get back on the road again.

Going out and finding Carter's Run was not without its difficulties. The directions to cemetery which I had copied down were from a map published a few years before. The present freeway layout around Warrenton looked a lot different than the crude map which I had hastily drawn. Also, Virginia county roads are generally marked by a confusion of small signs with numerical route numbers rather than full names, however, we eventually found Carter's Run Road (Route 691).

Even though I had a description of the cemetery being 2.1 miles from the junction of routes 689 and 691, we drove a few miles up and back along the narrow road without noticing anything which remotely looked like a cemetery. On our second run down the road however, we marked off the milage from the junction with a GPS receiver. I finally noticed an iron fence on top of a hill that had a small group of cattle grazing upon it. With the limited telephoto lens on my camera I could just make out the stones behind the fence.

Of course, there were no signs indicating that it was indeed a cemetery up upon the hill or even less what its name was. The only signs which I noticed were the liberal use of "POSTED No Hunting No Fishing No Trespassing" signs. Also, I was not absolutely sure if indeed this was the correct cemetery since I had noticed a number of other small cemeteries in the area on the maps which I had looked at while in Warrenton. I would need to look at the stones. No one seemed to be around in the general vicinity to asked for permission to cross the fenced area. My friend was not comfortable hopping a fence that was so clearly posted and I also was somewhat concerned that I could run into some angry farmer accusing me of messing with his cattle. Unhappily, the cemetery was just beyond our reach. Perhaps if there is a next time, I can get the proper permissions to examine these gravestones and see the valley below. I had to settle that my only vantage point was on the side of the road and I had to look at the cemetery and the surrounding country side from that less than optimum point of view and draw my assumptions about what it all meant just from that. At least I did not have to contend with the possibility of exploring the insides of a Fauquier County jail cell or picking rock salt out of my hind quarters for the next week.

Amid what appeared to be agri-business concerns and the occasional retirement or vacation homes along Carter's Run, it was difficult to imagine what this community must of looked like in the 1750's. Practically all that is left of that time are only the low-rolling hills that the community had been built upon. In my email messages and phone calls with Jim Burgess, he has waxed poetically upon occasion, how the Heflin-Moffett cemetery on Carter's Run is "hallowed ground" for Cockrill/Cockrell family members. He is fairly certain that Cockrills as far back as Thomas Cockrill's great grandparents, William and Hannah (Anderson) Cockrell, are all buried there without surviving markers. There is nothing much more then Jim's closely argued speculations based in mounds of circumstantial evidence to bind these individuals to this spot of earth. Indeed, since he has worked out his direct linage to Thomas and Lettetia Cockrill whose gravestones he has also looked upon and touched, one can appreciate the feeling which he carries for this place.

For me, this area around Carter's Run was some what reminiscent of the particular areas in Sonoma County where my Cockrill ancestors had lived. Perhaps not so much like the extinct town of Franklin where I can only imagine how it must of been with its scrub oak foot hills and the rolling alluvial lands around Santa Rosa Creek but are now undifferentiated from any other part of downtown Santa Rosa. Rather, I was thinking more of the some what diminished town of Bloomfield at the head of the Estero Americano Valley. I had been there the week before, visiting the Bloomfield Cemetery, which for a portion of the Cockrill family of Sonoma County is more or less their "hallowed" ground with three generations of family member and their associates. The view down the Big Valley towards Valley Ford is remarkable on a clear day. It too is one of my favorite places.

Burned golden brown by the hot California summer sun, it is however, unlike the verdant green landscape of Carter's Run, at least in early autumn. But there was this similarity with its rolling hills -- not too steep and definitely not flat, with its clumps of brush, a lone tree here and there, and cows occasionally dotting the landscape. I wonder how many other places that my Cockrill ancestors lived has a similar topology? Living on some flat plain, next to an ocean, and on the side of a steep mountain, does not appear to have appealed to them as much as living along a valley by a creek or river.

For my branch of the family, the connection to William and Hannah Cockrill and their unmarked grave sites in Heflin-Moffett is even more circumstantial than it is for Jim. Our relationship is rather a matter of the "most likely" possibility. For the researchers of the descendants of William and Frances (Jones) Cockrill, the Heflin-Moffett cemetery represents the terminus of our quest: it is beyond our grasp since tracing the parentage of our William Cockrill of Allen County, Kentucky has hit the proverbial brick wall. Heflin-Moffett could be our grail or just another wrong turn. At present, our work is suspended at this junction -- we could be stuck here for years or it can change at any moment. It is doubtful at this point that any other documented evidence will come to light.

At this moment in time, with the preliminary results of The Cockrill Family Tree DNA Project which Jim is now administrating, the connection between my branch of Cockrills and the branch out on Carter's Run can not be supported by the testing of DNA samples from the descendants of these lines. Such a result throws the reasoning and work of many years of research into doubt. If continued testing supports this non-connection then obviously we all have to start over, go our separate ways, and come up with some explanation of why so many people with apparently the same name appeared in Virginia at about the same time. Finding the evidence which breaks down an older preconceived assumption of a relationship and using that same evidence to form a new notion of a connection is of course at the heart of genealogy.

William's and Hannah's assumed grandson, and my 4 x great grandfather, Anderson Cockrill, spent the last months of his life living in San Jose in Santa Clara County. Coincidentally, this is where I have spent most of my adult life, blissfully ignorant for most of that time that I even had Cockrill family members or that it would have mattered anyway. My knowledge of such ancestors has only been accrued relatively recently. The story of the Cockrills in my family's history had been extinct for at least a generation or more when I came upon it. Through the helpful kindness of distant family researchers along with my own halting and stumbling endeavors, I have been able to recover a portion of a narrative which my own family could never tell me. In the place of silence, there is now a story line that stretches back to San Jose of 1860's and to a generation of a family which a few years before had walked out of Missouri to be part of the founding of the towns of Santa Rosa and Bloomfield in Sonoma County. The story can be traced back further to their parent's and grandparent's generations, to frontier settlements in Kentucky and South Carolina. The story finally becomes dissipated and garbled in Virginia in the late 1700's. Like my visit to the Heflin-Moffett cemetery, a coherent genealogy for the Cockrill family, exists just beyond our reach.

I unfortunately did not have time to locate the church which these Cockrells and Cockrills are believed to have attended on Carter's Run -- the Enon Primitive Baptist Church. There is very little history available about this church, except that it was founded in 1838. I am not clear about this, but various family members may have also attended other Baptist churches in the area, even before they were reorganized and named Old School Baptists (in 1832). A number of these churches existed in Fauquier County as well as in the Carter's Run area (we also visited the Upper Carter's Run Church in nearby Marshall).

From his gravestone in the Heflin Moffett Cemetery, we know that William's son, Thomas was "a devout member of the Old School Baptists Church." From this, Jim Burgess has inferred that William was probably a member of the Primitive Baptist Church as well. There could be this long tradition of the Cockrills belonging to various Primitive Baptists Churches in Fauquier County, South Carolina, Virginia to Kentucky, Missouri, and finally in Sonoma County, California. Some of the families associated with the Cockrills who had come with them to Sonoma County in 1853, specifically the Beavers and the Hagans, also appear to have had a long connection to this church.

Baptist church history for Virginia is complex and extensive. It remains a rich area for continued research into the Cockrill Family history. Also, one should point out that in Colonial times, The Church of Virginia, was the only religion allowed, and participating in the emerging Baptists and various other churches of the time was considered unlawful with the participants often being prosecuted. It would appear then that joining an "outlaw" church was not only an act of faith but also one of defiance against the repressive English government of the time. After all, the principles of freedom of religion also had its significance in these low rolling hillsides of Virginia.