On a warm July day in 1979, a sixteen-year-old named Jeffrey Carrier visited the old Donnelly Cemetery in Johnson County, Tennessee, a rural county in the northeast corner of the state. He was there for more than an hour, wandering from stone to stone, writing down every name, date and epitaph. It was the beginning of a project that took him six years to complete, and when it was done, he had visited 282 cemeteries in the county and recorded more than 10,000 names. The information was published in 1985 and has been aiding genealogists and historians ever since. The original edition was a limited printing, and most of those copies have fallen apart and are no longer extant. Except for another limited printing in 2012, the book has mostly been unavailable for use. This professionally-printed edition changes that, as the information is now available to everyone, everywhere who can trace their family roots back to Johnson County, Tennessee or who has an interest in cemeteries.
