I’ve been to the cemetery and had a good long look for myself. Seemed like the right place to start. I would have felt plenty stupid if it turned out that he had a stone the whole time. Let me just say…and I say this as a person from West Virginia who has seen some of the roughest and most neglected - or alternately, some of the most badly coal-company-abused cemeteries you can find anywhere in the world…this cemetery is in pitiful shape. It WILL take a brush hog to clear his grave if we can find it on a map – since we’re already raising money to put a stone in the cemetery, I’m thinking some part of this project should include cutting down trees and clearing some land and making the cemetery generally accessible again for everyone. Regardless, he may yet have a stone out there and I just couldn’t find it…

Since Floyd was buried in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery (at least, according to his death certificate he was), I’ve assumed he was a member of that congregation – therefore I wrote the pastors of the five A.M.E. churches in and around Sanford and asked them:

1. Are there any members of their congregation who might remember/be related to Floyd Council and may I be introduced to them?

2. When White Oak A.M.E. became defunct, did they inherit that church’s records and possibly the cemetery map?

I wrote the two Councils in the Sanford white pages and asked if they were related (not to each other – to Floyd). If so, can I come speak to them? Maybe they have a story to tell or a photograph I haven’t seen (I’ve only ever seen two pictures of him – in one of them his features are indistinct; in the other he looks jolly but sort of goofy) or maybe they actually attended his funeral and can point me to the right spot of ground…won’t know until I get some answers back.

I called the Sanford Public Library and set the reference librarian to work trying to find anything in the fiche that might help and through him contacted the Lee County Historical Society and set them to work looking through the archives for the White Oak records. Everyone I talk to I ask to keep an eye out for an old timer who might have been to the funeral and might have personal knowledge of the location of his grave.