FORT KNOX, Ky. — One thing after another over the last 20 years had prevented Denise Floyd from visiting relatives buried at Fort Knox.
COVID restrictions kept Floyd away, then it was the birth of a grandbaby on May 30, followed by the grandbaby’s first birthday celebration. Last year, it was severe weather at Fort Knox during the Memorial Day weekend – this year, her mom had to be hospitalized in Southern Indiana.
“This year I was determined to get here,” said Floyd. “The weather’s perfect, and this means a lot. I’ve been wanting to get here and take pictures of the stones and attach them to the record in [a genealogy app].”
Floyd, along with many others from across the United States and surrounding communities, took advantage of the annual open post cemetery visitation. She decided that while her siblings stayed with mom who was recovering in the hospital, she, her husband Jack, their daughter Jennifer and her son John Pelle would travel to Fort Knox to take in some of the 122-plus cemeteries that dot the military landscape.
“We came from Florida up to here,” said Floyd. “I thought, ‘This is the main reason we came, so we’re going.’”
By noon, 62 other visitors had already stopped by the Visitors Center at Chaffee Gate to get maps, directions, and share some of their families’ histories. Many more visitors had signed in at eight other checkpoints around the post.
One man and his wife told Fort Knox Cultural Resources director Niki Mills that he and his wife were visiting to find family members of his grandfather were buried at his Woodridge family cemetery. Another man said he was a professional genealogist and was looking for information on a particular family cemetery where his relatives were interred.
Floyd said she’s on a personal mission: to gather the evidence needed to apply for Daughters of the American Revolution. She has also traced her family to the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock on Nov. 9, 1620.
“My lineage goes back to Bartholomew and Isaac Allerton,” said Floyd.
Isaac was a passenger aboard the Mayflower, signer of the Mayflower Compact and actively involved in governmental affairs in the colony. Bartholomew was his son. Bartholomew’s family eventually merged with the Wilkersons, where Issac Miller Wilkerson rests – Floyd’s great-great grandfather.
In the middle of the cemetery towers a cedar tree over roughly 20 graves of Wilkersons and Meltons. A baby’s gravestone sits behind it with the initials A.C.W. etched at the top.
“My great grandfather William Clark Wilkerson planted this cedar tree as a little sapling,” said Floyd. “He planted it at the head of his baby’s grave when they buried him. The baby was just three days old.
“This tree was planted in 1912. Look how big it is now!”
Shade from the tree covered all the graves. Circling the cemetery in nearby trees, cicadas sang their mating songs of death. And new life.
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