I've nothing I'd want to bet the farm on. I suppose you could attempt to place the grave based on those of relatives in the immediate vicinity.

There is one alleged old method for locating a grave, but it may be nothing more than an old fart's tale. I learned of it several years ago when my CW group, Stanford's MS Battery, decided to mark the old Castalian Springs Cemetery near Durant.

The cemetery was that of an old no longer existing church (Wesley Chapel Methodist Church). Just a mile or so up the (then) road was a fairly large girls' school, which had a big ol' dormatory building.

Following the battles at Shiloh and around Corinth in '62, the Southerners had a great many wounded to care for. Their solution was to load these wounded on trains and send them down the north-south railroad that ran through Corinth (I forget the 19th Century name for the RR) and stop at every town and place that had a suitable facility and off-load as many wounded as each place could handle. They kept going south until all the wounded had been placed. As a result, many Mississippi towns still have fair-sized Confederate burial plots.

Anyhow, our research had come up with 87 names, and so we'd ordered the stones for these men and were at work one weekend emplacing them.

Now, there are many more as yet unknown and still unmarked veterans buried at Wesley Chapel. There is a chain link fence around the old cemetery, erected not too many years ago. Our resarch indicated that the Confederate plot extended outside that fence in front of the cemetery. This is clear from the existance of an obelisk erected during the early years of the 20th Century by the UDC. The accounts we'd found indicated that the obelisk had been emplaced in the center of the Confederate plot, whose graves were originally marked with wooden markers.

This obelisk is now just inside the modern chain link fence. We had a few locals show up to help get the stones in the ground. One old fellow heard us speculating about how far outside the fence the graves actually ran. He went to his car and came back with two pieces of coat hanger wire, bent into right angles and about a foot on a side.

The gentleman claimed that if you held the wires loosely by a leg, one in each hand, and with the other legs sticking out to either side, and you walked over ground you suspected contained a grave, the wires would rotate so that the legs would point down when you came to the head of a grave.

He started walking about and his wires started to dipping at regular intervals, and many of the "dip" spots were indeed in grave-length depressions.

My curiosity got the best of me and I borrowed these "divining" wires and tested them on some graves in the cemetery that are marked by civilian stones, and danged if the wires didn't dip every time I came to the head of a marked grave.

Take it for what it is worth. Some weeks later, I tried it again in my family's cemetery with a pair of wires I made, and it seemed to work again. I know of the location of a few unmarked graves there, and the wires dipped at one end of each of them.

At any rate, in all of our grave marking projects, we have never been able to determine the specific resting place of any specific soldier, as most of these graves were originally marked, if at all, with wooden markers which no longer exist.

The only exception to this are the graves of three soldiers among the 102 who rest in the Confederate plot at Brice's Crossroads.

One grave had been marked by the soldier's family after the war. They'd put up a stone marker.

Charlie Sullivan has this amazing glue he uses to reassemble gravestones that have been broken. We put in the new VA marker on this soldier's grave and then glued the old one to its back.

A second exact spot came to light the day we rededicated the cemetery. A descendant of one soldier noted the stone we'd put up for the fellow and told us he was actually buried a mile or so up the Guntown road, on the spot where he and three others fell.

So we dug up this stone and she took us to the spot, which is beneath a small grove of trees in a cow pasture. So that one is in the right place.

The third instance was that of a young soldier who was mortally wounded a few miles north of Brice's Crossroads as Forrest's troopers pursued the Yankees back toward Memphis. This young man had crawled off the road and was too weak to get any further.

A farmer whose house was just a few yards away saw the boy and he and his family came out to see whether they could help. He died a short time later and the farmer buried the young soldier right there along the roadside.

The lad had passed along some personal effects to be returned to his family. The farmer dutifully sent them to the soldiers' home. Some years later, the lad's family came to see where he had died. They planted cedar saplings at the head and foot of the grave.

The cedars thrived and grew. Some time passed until the UDC began to erect "Unknown Confederate Soldier" stones at Brice's Crossroads after the original wooden markers deteriorated. They'd placed one on the young soldier's grave.

We discovered his name during our research effort and so we ordered the young soldier a VA marker, which we emplaced in the spot occupied by the "Unknown" marker.

Now his name is known to passersby who stop to view the lonely grave tucked between two sturdy and shady cedar trees.

It was one of those moments that make all the sweating and sore muscles one gets from hefting 230 pound stone markers worth it all.

But with those few exceptions, the best we are usually able to do is to get a stone with each soldier's name on it in the plot. It may not be on the right spot, but at least visitors will know the name of each man buried there, which is a sight better than the previous situation.