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mcc-jrr_752-001

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Lacey Cemetery, 75-2 Summary Report, page 1

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LACEY CEMETERY, 75 - 2 Summary Report The name “Lacey” is a variant spelling of “Lacy”. It appears that after the Civil War, there may have been a deliberate action taken by court clerks or census enumerators to vary the spellings of a given surname to show a distinction between the white slave owners and the liberated former slave population who took their new surnames from their previous white owners. The spelling variation happened too frequently to be simply random, and the new variations were consistently used for the black population. However, the Lacy name was also changed in a sense for the white family that settled around Lacey's Spring in Morgan County. The story is told that a postal clerk changed the spelling soon after the Civil War to add the “e” to the post office name, even though the white family who settled there and owned land and slaves in Madison County consistently spelled the name without the “e”. Perhaps the postal clerk was himself a freed former slave, given the job during the post-war Reconstruction period in the South, when many blacks had jobs formerly reserved for the white population. In any event, the name of this cemetery is without doubt connected to the land and slave owner Theophilus Lacy, who lived from 1804 to 1876. This particular cemetery is located in the extreme southeastern corner of the southeastern quarter of Section 14, Township 5, Range 1 West. History of the ownership of the land can be reviewed in the Summary Report of the Lacy Cemetery, 75 - 1, which is named for Theophilus' family and is about a quarter mile north-northeast of the Lacey Cemetery, 75 - 2. The history of the two cemeteries is closely linked until after the 1890s, about when the land is thought to have passed into black ownership. 1 - (2706)    

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