3 day trip to Devon - Day 2; Exeter to Stoke Gabriel & Paington

23 July 2016, day two in Exeter and the husband host from our Bed and Breakfast took us down to the Rental company we had chosen, Thrifty Car & Van Rental, and we were signed out with a manual Ford Focus with a Sat Nav system. I hadn't driven a manual for some time so it took a little while for me to remember to change down gears for intersections and going up hill. So just after 10am, off we headed on the A380 road to Plymouth initially, and then we found ourselves on country lanes with little to see apart from the roadside walls and hedgerows. Back in 1963, when I spent a week with Nancy & Jack Litton in Paington, they had taken me on a days drive to Dartmouth and then up to Stoke Gabriel to see the gravestone of our common ancestor, my maternal great great grandparents, Henry and Maria Harding. Then back through Totnes to Paington.
However with us based in Exeter (where we could get accommodation and, a rental car) it was logical for us to head to Stoke Gabriel from the north. When we arrived at Stoke Gabriel we found it was a tiny village and I needed to do 3 point reverse turn and couldn't work out how to put the car into reverse. Asking a local guy's help gave us the answer and we found parking in the walled area near the local pub.

Jeantine and Barb approach the Church gate, 11:26am

Wikipedia says; "Fisherman probably first came to Stoke Gabriel to fish salmon and gain access to the River Dart. The village has an approximately 1,000-year-old yew tree in the churchyard of The Church of St Mary and St Gabriel, a church which has stood since Norman times."

Off to one side of the Church was this heavy door and ...

Inside this space was a layout map of the graveyard

On the shelf under the layout map was a folder of the names interred here but, under the 'H' listings, the only Hardings listed, were from the 1980s, not the Harding we wanted from 1888.

Jeantine slowly worked her way along each row of headstones to finally strike pay dirt.

There it was, still there after all those years but no longer in one piece as it was when I last saw it.

Luckily for us the Sexton came through the churchyard before heading out somewhere and we were able to show him, to his surprise, our family headstone that was not on the Church list. I think he said a team of volunteers had mapped and annotated the entire church yard back in the 1970s or 1980s and he couldn't explain why the Harding headstone was not noted.

Photo by Jeantine as we discuss our find. The Sexton kept saying he couldn't understand how the team of volunteers had missed this headstone as the Church committee felt they had done a good job.

The location of the Harding headstone, relative to the Church tower - 12:35pm. Then after lunch at the village pub we came back through to get a locating photo looking the other way.

Post lunch walk through to get this locating photo at 1:41pm 23 July 2016

The photograph I took in 1963