Historian. Genealogist. Grave hunter. Three ways to describe Bill Kittrell.

While some use wills and deeds, bank documents and Bibles to track their ancestors, Kittrell can often be found at their final resting places.

The Greenville resident began poking around gravesites to find his own relatives but expanded that over more than five years to encompass the history of a county.

The two weighty volumes of the Cemetery Survey of Pitt County, compiled by Kittrell and his wife, include 870 cemeteries and 45,000 names.

“It never was an area I was afraid of,” he said of cemeteries. “At least that was one place people wouldn’t bother you. Peaceful and quiet.”

Well, there was that one time. Strolling through a recently flooded grave site, markings washed away, he sunk down to knee depth in a grave. He could just feel some imagined bony hand reaching up around his leg, he said.

That was one of several stories he shared with fellow members of the Pitt County Historical Society and the public Sunday as part of the organizations celebration of the county’s 250th anniversary. It was the second community lecture in the series “Turpentine Drippings: Pitt County History, Stories and Families.” A spring banquet at Yankee Hall in Pactolus is next on the schedule of events, scheduled for March 25.

Kittrell talked about generals, plantation owners, educators and industry innovators. And where they wound up. He read beautiful poetry from headstones, followed by inscriptions more ominous or just plain strange: “An excellent wife, fond mother and indulgent mistress” or “Carolina born and Carolina bred, here I lie Carolina dead.”

A demonstration of how to use a dowsing rod — a thin, copper wire used to detect disturbances in a soil bed — elicited laughs from his audience of 90 people, many doubtful over whether the instrument could actually tell whether the body beneath was male or female.

He was followed by County Commissioner Ephraigm Smith, who introduced himself as a sixth generation farmer working the same land as his forefathers. A table full of aging tools sat at his left, used to bend barrels into form, harvest tar and turpentine from trees and shape shingles. Smith, too, shared his own genealogy and family stories about the area.

“Looking back on who we were, it certainly gives us perspective on who we are today,” PCHS member Jerri Sutton said.

The crowd left knowing a little more about the former, at least.

Contact Kathryn Kennedy at kkennedy@reflector.com or (252) 329-9566.