All Hunt, No Find.

It was a three day weekend, plenty of time to take on a new cemetery, new to me anyhow. I had no fresh requests, but findagrave had several older open requests that I’d simply never gotten around to. As I reviewed the list I was looking for quantity vs. size. A single request in a cemetery of over a thousand interments didn’t leap out at me, those can chew up hours, and recall that success only averages about 50% anyhow. Better, I thought, to go for multiple requests in smaller cemeteries, cull the low hanging fruit first.

I came across Buster Cemetery located in South central Jeff Co. near a town called Valles Mines. Buster listed a little over a hundred interments and four open requests.

I’d not been there before but had always assumed I’d get around to it.

Valles Mines was founded on 1749 by a French (Canadian) guy, Francois Valle. Yeah that’s right, by a guy named (when translated into American) Frankie Valli.

He started by visiting from Quebec (which is in Canada) and buying lead from local natives. He eventually decided to cut out the middle man and open his own mining company. The mining was done the old fashioned way, cheap labor. Some of the lead/zinc he extracted was used by the fledgling American militia to fight the war of independence.

The mines have long since played out, the town is basically a shadow of its former self. Some of the shallow, surface dug mines are still accessible and an effort is underway to build and maintain a museum in Frankie’s (Francois’s) original settlement house.

I cross checked the requests against my tweaked and speedy lookup list compiled from online transcription records. I had one match, which meant that someone had actually come across at least one of the requested markers there. I did not check the ‘notes’ column though, until later.

I printed out a map with directions, and oddly enough remembered to carry it with me. It took about a half hour to get near it, a few more minutes to slow down and actually find it. Pictures of the cemetery online showed a wooden sign over an entrance. The sign had actually fallen since that picture, and the entrance was nothing more than an open section of fence. The old cemetery had been recently and hurriedly mowed, though not detailed.

There were no huge or ornate obelisks or fancy stones. Mostly low–end simple, tilted, leaning, and broken ones scattered amongst a few anonymous field stones. As I stepped out of the car I almost stepped on one stone, right at the entrance, flat on its back and mostly sunken into the ground.

There was sign of recent activity, flags and flowers among the scattered and unevenly spaced graves. Around one fairly recent stone, someone had built a small wooden wall, installed a bench, a message board and two solar yard lights. Not as elaborate as some of the grave-altars I visited in Japan, but still a considerable effort.

It only took a few minutes to check the whole cemetery. Even though the graves were not in straight lines there just weren’t enough of them to make it take very long. I had three family names in my head, McGee, Anderson and Hall. I found a couple of McGee’s but not the right ones. Hall, nothing, Anderson, not the right one. This was frustrating since I’d crosschecked and found one. I had brought my awesome little netbook with me and opened up the speedy spreadsheet. This time I read the ‘notes’ column for the entry I thought I should find:

“s/o Guy & Stell; Infant; Born in of Valles Mines. Did not find”

Allow me to explain. Whenever someone does a proper transcription project at a cemetery, they have with them a previous transcription list. It’s not a blank slate every time. They simply add new finds to the old list and also make a note on the list if they can not locate one that was there before. That’s the deal here. This stone once existed and was legible, but was not found at the last read.

What happened to it?

It sunk into the ground, crumbled, wore down to complete illegibility or was removed. I have no idea in this specific case.

Four requests, zero finds, bad for my average so I re-walked the entire cemetery, photo’d a couple of same-family-name matches (McGee, Anderson), still nothing.

It turns out that the most recent transcription list for Buster had about a dozen “did not find’s” on it, that’s roughly ten percent of the total number of markers.

As I mentioned earlier there were few if any fancy or pricy stones in this cemetery. Buster is a few miles out of town on a country road, if you can really still call Valles Mines a town. There is a house across the road and down a little, and adjacent to the cemetery there is a metal building, perhaps a maintenance garage. Very few cars went buy during my hour-long visit, so this is not along a main route for many people. The cemetery had been mowed in the last few weeks, but no attempt had been made to fix the sign. Many of the markers were either low quality, or hand made, small, concrete slabs with names and dates carved by hand. One was simply concrete with marbles pressed in to spell the names. Several graves had only the funeral homes’ metal markers, one or two of which I noticed, had been mowed to shreds.

Frustrated and saddened I left unfulfilled.

Instead of heading home I drove roughly east to Ste. Genevieve County, a return to Lebanon Baptist Church.

This would be my third trip there in the last month. The first time I ended up arriving during Church services and left quickly, the second I spent some time looking for Pilliard’s and Bailey’s, not finding the requested one, but still adding a new name or two to the requestor’s family search.

Those that I had found were appreciated, but Grace, the requestor, was unrelenting. She queried me about the possibility of there being an extension or second site to the cemetery as all those I’d found were at least a decade older than the one she was looking for. I got in contact with another Jeff Co/Ste G. Co. grave finder, he answered back that yes indeed there was a second section. He did not tell me where it was, but I already had an idea.

I’d noticed a slightly paved drive that went up the hill from the cemetery. I didn’t give it much thought before since I’d not been looking for a supplemental area. So on that hunch alone I drove another thirty minutes to Ste. G.

I drove directly up the hill and sure enough an acre had been cleared out and a hand-painted sign signified that this too was part of the Lebanon Baptist burial field.

Only about a hundred graves, all dated later than the early 1940’s. I found a couple more Bailey’s and a couple of Pilliard’s, and then went ahead and photo’d all the graves so I wouldn’t have to drive back.

None of the graves was for the missing Jonathon Fite Bailey. He reportedly died in 1939, right on the cusp of the transition between the old and the new sections, but a thorough search of both had come up empty. Grace was polite and thankful for the new finds, but hasn’t given up yet looking for a stone for J.F. though I won’t be going back for a while, it’s a long way. It’s my opinion that there is no such stone in that cemetery. That doesn’t mean he isn’t buried there, I just can’t prove that he is. There’s no law saying you have to put down a stone.

300 Priests, more or less.

While researching cemeteries in Jefferson County I came across a transcription list that stood out from the others complied by the county Historical Society. It was for Liguori Cemetery, which I’d never heard of. The fact that I’d not heard of it wasn’t the interesting part. Nearly all the almost three hundred names on the list were prefaced with Fr. or Br. The list itself was provided, according to the transcription list “by Father William McKee”. Findagrave.com did not even list the cemetery.

* Disclaimer: I am not Catholic, never have been and never will be. I have nothing in particular against the Church or its followers, in fact I am fascinated and intrigued by the whole institution. I am also admittedly ignorant of many of its ways and means. Any errors, misstatements or misrepresentations in this entry are a result of that ignorance, not out of malice.

Peeling back the history of this cemetery I tried to learn a little more about the history, lives and works of the folks there, but I kept running into geek barriers. You know how if you ask a car geek a simple question about your car sounding funny, or burning too much oil you end up getting sucked in to the minutiae about things that have no meaning to you whatsoever, like timing, dwell, compression, ignition sequence. . . Well the Catholic Church and the Redemptorists themselves have a rich language and symbology as well and to this outsider it quickly causes the eyes to glaze over. That’s not a put down, just an acknowledgement, one kind of geek to another, that I didn’t grow up in that culture and am just not fluent in the subtleties and dialect.

Challenged by the unknown, I started researching Liguori, Mo. Which is as it turns out named for Saint Alphonsus Liguori, founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. It’s a Catholic thing. Further research revealed that Liguori is the home of several more Catholic things, a Senior Care facility, Liguori Publications (a publishing house with $20 – 50 million annual revenue), and a nunnery, convent or whatever the politically correct word is for a home for nuns: http://www.redemptoristinenuns.org/ They seem like a dutiful, contemplative bunch. Liguori is 120 acres in size and was home of the Liguori Mission House in 1947. One year later a post office was opened there making it the first PO in the world named after that particular Saint. It would seem to me that if I were made a Saint (pause for groans and laughter) that subsequently having a little post office named in my honor might not be such a huge deal. Then in 1960, or thereabouts the convent was opened. My intentions for the cemetery were completely innocent and secular. I had in front of me an entire cemetery that didn’t exist on findagrave, and saw the chance to bring these folks online. I made plans for the weekend, weather permitting, to check it out. That Sunday morning I grabbed water, my camera, the list of names, and a map . As per custom, I forgot to actually take the map with me. This resulted in about forty five minutes driving around in ever widening circles five or six miles form the actual location. Upon finally finding it, by seeing a sign pointing to Liguori Publications, I was pleasantly surprised. There were no stores or gas stations or tanning salons. Entering Liguori was like entering a small college campus. Freshly mowed lawns, a few large buildings, all clean and well maintained, shady trees smooth, un-striped roads, benches under the trees, and very little vehicular traffic. At the end of the road was the large, but neat and tidy publishing house with parking available for the approximately 150 workers, none of them working on this day. I parked there, grabbed my camera and my official findagrave.com cap and walked back down the road approximately one hundred yards where I had spotted the cemetery.It was starting to heat up, but was still moderate, the short walk making me sweat only a little. I had never seen a more logically laid out cemetery. The stones were in a tight grid, and nearly uniform in construction. There were in fact only three or four different types of stone, and like stones were clustered together. They were all simple, frugal and efficient. The graves were uniformly space, with no empty plots interrupting the grid. It was a cemetery that looked as though it were designed by a mathematician or engineer, someone that prized function far more than form. Since the inscriptions all pointed the same direction, east, I started at the eastern-most point and stopped at the first stone. The first few were the exceptions to the standards of the rest of the field. Old stones, not perfectly aligned, and the inscriptions not uniform. This was true only for that first row. This anarchy was discarded immediately starting with the second row. I decided to go ahead, row by row and shoot them all, or at least try. After the first row it got easy, quickly. Since all the stones in a row were the same build, I could stop, shoot, sidestep, shoot, sidestep, shoot, etc. without having to refocus or adjust the zoom. In all I got nearly three hundred shot in less than an hour.Occasionally I stopped to ponder only if for example I noticed the dates between ordination and death were very close, like less than a year as I saw on one or two of them. All the stones had the same basic information, date of birth, date ‘professed’, date ordained, and date of death. All of them had the name, preceded by “Rev. or Br. and followed by C.S.S.R (or C.Ss.R) which stands for “Congregatio Sanctissimi Redemptoris” or in English: “Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer." This is the official title for the order. (I only found this out later as part of my post-research, I grew up in rural Kentucky, and Latin was not exactly a must-have language there.) I also found out that the official mission (charism) of the order is: “With Him is plentiful redemption." Which I like as a mission statement as it is completely lacking in action verbs. (Source: http://mission.liguori.org/redemptorists/whoare.htm ) 
By the end of the shoot I was covered in sweat and my water was as warm as that sweat, and about as tasty. I trotted (walked) back to the car and fired up the non-frugal or chaste air conditioner and let it blast my body down to reasonable temperatures. I pointed the car towards home, bid adieus to the brothers and sisters and left as quietly and respectfully as I had arrived. I suppose this would be the time to mention the spiritual nature and sensations that are sure to be a part of walking the grounds of so many deceased spiritual soldiers. Sorry, I’ve got nothing. Perhaps my mind is just too closed to that realm, but to be honest, I actually truly enjoyed the peace and serenity of this cemetery, but no more or less than any other. I enjoy cemeteries, I find them peaceful and I tend to get contemplative in them, but none really more than another regardless of the connection to things religious. If any grave causes me to break that emotional wall, it is the tragic deaths, of toddlers, teenagers, soldiers and young mothers. Most of the men buried in this cemetery lived very long lives in the service of their church and were probably in close touch with their own mortality. If unfulfilled spirits indeed haunt the physical world, I would not think this was the place they’d be found. Once I got home I showered and grabbed a bite. I then transferred the nearly three hundred photos to my awesome little netbook. I then began the tedious task of creating the cemetery on findagrave then the individual memorials themselves. I accomplished this by opening up the photos one at a time and typing in the relevant names and dates into the database. The photos themselves had to be reduced, which meant opening up a photo editor and resizing each one to fit in the allowable size for findagrave. Many of the photos also needed to be cropped to center them and make them uniform. Almost as many needed to be rotated from two to five degrees. In my haste the camera was not always level causing several to appear crooked. Once the photo was fixed I saved a copy, leaving the original high-detailed photo intact, giving the small adjusted copy the name on that person’s stone. I then uploaded that photo to findagrave and went on to the next one.
Once I established a rhythm I was clipping along at about three minutes per stone. Best estimates predicted about thirteen to twenty hours of solid, boring, repetitive work, a task that I still haven’t completed. A few here, a few there, I ought to be done by Spring. As of this writing there’s 108 complete, I’ll keep you updated. To date I can not determine if anyone has searched for any of these men. There have been no requests for more info or photos. But then again I don’t expect there will be many. Historically I get most requests and questions from descendants of the interred. By definition catholic priests don’t have many, if any descendants. They are in evolutionary and genealogical terms, dead ends. However they are likely somebody’s uncle, brother or son. So at least there’s a chance that there will be searches even if only by people whose lives they touched.



*** Update. The uploads were completed over the subsequent weeks/months. I've even gone back a couple of times to add new graves.


Oct 17, 2023
Update:
I received a rather unusual request a few days ago:
" . . . I am one of the Redemptorist priests who lives at St. Clement's, next to Liguori Cemetery. We are in the process of creating a website for St. Clement's. Can we have digital copies of all the pictures of the tombstones you have taken in Liguori Cemetery? That would save us from having to duplicate the great work you have already done."

Yes, yes you can Fr. Luberti.
 Delivered. Awesome!