The Family Cemetery & Isaiah Basford Huff Mysteries

This will be two posts in one.  First off, Kim and Shelly and I went out back yesterday with Kim's metal detector again looking for evidence of the Basford Family Cemetery.  This time armed with  evidence derived from Wayne, who took me to the spot that was shown to him by my grandfather a handful of years before his death.  At that time Grampy was looking for remnants of a page wire fence that he recalled being around the cemetery.  Unfortunately, we found no remnants of page wire, even with the metal detector.  We did find two bent spikes that COULD have been used to nail wire to a tree.  They were found in the ground maybe 30 feet apart, in areas that you could make the argument COULD have been two corners of the fencing...not much to go on as far as proof.
If you have not seen this, I think you'll find it interesting.  The following link is of the deed from Nathaniel Basford to James Basford which mentions the cemetery.  Unfortunately, all of the descriptions are from the grave of his daughter Maryetta, whose headstone is in the barn.  And since it is very difficult to read, I'll translate as best I can as follows:

Note that this is a deed from 1857 transferring the property from Nathaniel to his youngest son James and it mentions that Nathaniel has lived here 32 years.  So he would've bought the first piece of this land in about 1825!

"Reserving however a piece of ground four rods square commencing at the north side of the grave of my daughter Maryetta and extending southerly four rods and easterly two rods from the centre of said grave and extending westerly two rods fromt he centre of said grave, making sixteen square rods of ground for a family burying yard."  (a rod being 5 1/2 yards or 16 1/2 feet)  Four rods equaling 66 feet.

So while coming back to do some more research, Shelly and I notice something that I had only paid minimal attention to before; that being the fact that Nathaniel's eldest son, Isaiah, ends up being adopted by his maternal grandfather, Moses Huff, at the age of seven.  Why in that day in age especially would you "adopt out" your eldest son, at the time still retaining three daughters?  This occurs just a few years before Nathaniel buys the first piece of what becomes the family farm and about a year after his second son, Reuben, is born.