During a recent family-history focused tour, my wife and I visited the burial ground of my 7th great grandfather, William Talley. The cemetery and church lies in what is now a heavily industrialized area of Marcus Hook, PA, near the shore of the Delaware River. The grave markers at this cemetery date to the early 1700s, many illegible and worn by the centuries. Talley died in 1790, and he is marked in an area reserved for military veterans of the era, with newer monuments. I suspect that his original burial was elsewhere in this same cemetery.
The life story of William Talley is very well documented and more extensive than what I have in the info below; good topics for a future telling. One thing we discover in genealogy is that there are often more details available for centuries-old ancestors than for those who lived more recently. That is due to the compounding factors of ancestry – a man like Talley probably has around a million total descendants and perhaps 100,000 living today. He is simply better-researched than most of our grandparents from the 1800s.
Below, find a one-page, sharable PDF outlining Talley's generational relationship to my grandma, as well as a map of the region that Talley inhabited during his life, and a brief bio and photos from our visit. These files may be freely downloaded and used.
