A Day in the Life of a “Grave Finder”

Dennis C. Bentley

It has been just over a week since I was a guest on St. Louis Public Radio’s noon, live talk show “St. Louis On the Air”. (SLOTA)
Let’s go back a bit.
A week or so before the show, I was contacted by one of the SLOTA staff members, Aaron Doerr, about my hobby of documenting (photographically) Jefferson County, (Mo.) cemeteries. This seemed to fascinate a few people at the station. I agreed to do the show because I don’t mind pitching in occasionally. Yeah, I work there, I’m STLPR’s IT guy. I have been working there for more than 5 years. I love it. I like the people, the environment, the mission, the hours, pretty much everything about it.

So I did the show (follow this link to hear it) and went on about my business, replacing toner cartridges, fussing with the UMSL (our parent organization) bureaucracy, setting up laptops, etc.
I cross-posted the link to my social media page and got a few likes and comments. 
Aaron’s initial proposal to do the show flattered me a little and Elaine (the host) treated me as a true guest rather than a co-worker.
Aaron’s query re-ignited my interest in grave documentation. I have been remiss in my activities the last few years.
So the weekend after he made the proposal I ventured out for the first time in a couple of years. I visited the local cemetery first, to get back in the groove. I then drove out to a couple more local cemeteries to play catch-up, to grab photos of those buried since my last visit.
The weekend following the Friday afternoon interview, I went out again, venturing further.
On Tuesday Aaron caught me in the hallway and asked if I’d seen the public reaction and comments to SLOTA’s link post of the show.
I hadn’t looked there.
At the next available opportunity, I pulled out my phone and looked it up. Sure enough there were 20+ comments posted, mostly positive.
One stood out, from Shannon F.:
“I’m not sure if you are aware of a cemetery off Gary Road in Imperial. I don’t know the name. Someone told me about it and I couldn’t see it for quite a while on my drive to and from work but was surprised one day to see tombstones in an area of trees. I would bet it is not indexed in Find A Grave. As a genealogy researcher, I thank you for your work that allows us to find information.”
I was not aware of this particular burial ground. This is one of the several burial grounds that I have not had the chance to visit.  I was not even familiar with Gary Road.

Not knowing the precise geographical location or address was an impediment. Not knowing even the name of the cemetery was even more frustrating, research-wise.  I did a Google Earth scan of Gary Road, a minor road that connects two other roads rather that one town to another. It was majority wooded and there was no sky-view, visible cemetery.
I was . . . intrigued.
So this morning (Saturday) I woke up at 6:15, my usual time as of late, and coffee’d up enough to start the rusty gears grinding. I ran through the morning chores, made myself a light breakfast. Angel was up about 7:15, I showered, shaved and was out the door before 9.
 I could just casually drive up and down that road with little hope of actually being able to see anything. Or not at all.  No hurry, no pressure. I’ve done this before. 
I had a couple of other, 'backup' cemeteries to keep me occupied anyhow.

Once I took care of three other cemeteries, about as much as I can handle in a single outing, I still had some fuel in the tank so I set the GPS to find Gary Road. It was a bit out of my way, up in the northeast part of the county, but I had little else on the day’s schedule.
The trek was very curvy, very hilly, past warning signs of ‘limited sight distance’ and ‘farm machinery’ and ‘trucks entering highway’. A narrow, rural road, not unlike those I learned to drive on as a teenager in rural Kentucky.
Then, there, about 1 or 1.5 miles up Gary Road, I saw them. The headstones, off in the woods just beside the road.

I pulled into the nearest driveway, girded my loins, worked up the courage, and walked up to a house directly across the road from the cemetery. A massive-sounding dog inside started barking immediately.
You never know about houses in rural Jefferson County. Would they be friendly or would they just start shooting? (just kidding)
I heard a lady’s voice behind the door. I pushed back the anxiety sweat and rehearsed my introduction, my explanation, my reason for knocking on the door.
She opened the door and smiled.
“Good morning ma’am. ..  .  I’m not from around here and I wanted to ask about the cemetery across the road.”
She didn’t know much at all about it other than that the Arnold (Mo.) Historical Society came by a while back and asked if they could park in her driveway so they could clean it up.
“Do you know who owns the land?” I asked.
“I think the City of Arnold, as far as I know.”

It wasn’t fenced off, wasn’t marked with a ‘No Trespassing’ sign or the ubiquitous purple spray paint that means the same. I took all of this to mean that I was free to roam the area.
I asked for no more than the Historical Society did, a place to park. She seemed fine with that. I grabbed my Nikon, locked the car and crossed the road.
The cemetery had all the appearance of being long-abandoned. Heavy ground cover, fallen branches, toppled headstones, sunken earth in various spots. There was not a single prominent name, just a scattering of several German-ish surnames here and there. Some of the older stones had the tell-tale
words “Geb” (birth) and “Gest” (Death) indicating German immigrants. Not at all uncommon for the general area. Yucca plants littered the grounds as is often the case with older cemeteries.

The most recent burial, indicated by still-standing headstones was for John H. Kaiser who died in 1939.
All the other stones looked older, a lot older. Those I could make out had burial dates in the late 1800’s through early 1900’s.
About 15 stones total, mostly in pretty bad shape. I took photos, lots and lots of photos.
After discreetly peeing in the woods on the edge of the site (I was, against my own broadcast advice, ?x? miles from any public facility and quite desperate) I headed home.
Once there I consumed a couple of corn dogs and some tots and fired up the 10 year old laptop in the guest room.
The Detective Work: (75% of the actual effort)
I pulled the SD card out of my camera and plugged it into the laptop. I opened the latest files.
I opened a browser and entered ‘findagrave Jefferson County, Missouri”
I then did a memorial search for John H. Kaiser.
Bingo.
He was listed, and a photo of his headstone popped up in the

ULRICH cemeterylistings. I expanded the cemetery and found that photos of all the stones I had observed were already posted.
This was not disappointing; I would have been more surprised/disappointed if they had NOT been posted. That close to the side of a public road, somebody, SOMEBODY would/should have noticed it before.
At this point however, I knew more about that cemetery than the lady that lived directly across the road from it. I knew its name.
I jumped to the Jefferson County Heritage and Historical Society site and sure enough, they had a transcription list* for it.

During the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that society did a very thorough job of documenting, manually, nearly every cemetery and headstone in the county. They did not miss this one. Dave Hallemann of that society, led the effort. I met Dave a couple of times in the late 2010’s as I too was, at the time, a part of that society. He was retired by then but still relatively active. He stopped showing up for the meetings shortly after we met.
There is another section in the JeffCo Historical Society’s web site called ‘Dave’s Cemetery Articles’. These are mostly about abandoned/neglected cemeteries and burial grounds. Dave was very thorough with plat maps and charts and land deed transfers in these articles. I’ve never been that familiar/comfortable with either.
Dave’s article about this particular cemetery produced a fountain of information. Here’s a link.
I will only summarize here:
“Comes now petitioners herein, in person and by attorney, and petition being presented to the Court, the Court doth find from said petition and the evidence adduced; that petitioner Chas. H. Edinger, Chas. Ulrich, Wm. H. Becker, John Schwalbert and Frank Schwalbert are descendents and representatives of the 13 families who on or about May 19, 1854, constituted themselves into an organization then as the German Evangelical Church”
Translated: A ‘community’ of individuals formed a church. In 1854 the group bought four acres + from the Ulrich estate for $60 for the purposes of a church building and burial ground.
The church was never built. Members of that group and descendants were indeed buried there though.
In 1934 the issue of the land returned to the county court:
“This decision by the court declares that the 4+/- acres deeded for church be rescinded, and 1 acre for a family burying be set aside for the 13 original families that formed the German Evangelical Church.  The remaining 3 +/- acres be vested in Harry Frederitzi. With this court order we cannot assign the name of German Evangelical Church Cemetery as the attempt to construct the church was unsuccessful. And as John Ulrich’s wife being one of the 13 original families, and this cemetery is commonly known as Ulrich Cemetery in records such as the History of Arnold, we also will give it the name of ULRICH CEMETERY.”
Thus, instead of inheriting the name of the founding group, the cemetery retained (officially) the name of one of the original members.
Even though there are no Ulrich’s with legible headstones in the cemetery.
Complicated, right? Welcome to Cemetery Research 101.

So the better part of my day was spent hunting for, photographing, researching this one small, neglected cemetery. None of my photos from this morning will be uploaded to FindaGrave. Because they aren’t needed there.  A waste of time? Hardly. I learned some stuff, now you too have learned a thing or two.
This sort of thing happens more often than one might expect. For the 3000 + photos I have posted to FindaGrave there are many, many, perhaps thousands more, that are simply laid to rest in my personal computer files.

So there's your answer Shannon, you can consider yourself part of the story now!

* I can’t say enough about the Jefferson County Historical Society’s transcription lists. Not all counties in Missouri, or the rest of the country, have an equivalent.  These lists were created and updated by dozens of local volunteers over the course of 20+ years. I use these lists to help determine the odds of finding a particular requested photo. FindaGrave is not perfect, there is no verification staff at Findagrave.  There is no data for a specific cemetery on FindaGrave at all unless volunteers submit it.

Many requests for headstone photos go unfulfilled. There are many reasons for this. Either the request is based on erroneous information, or the burial was never marked with a stone, or the stone itself is missing/buried/destroyed. The transcription lists let me know, pretty reliably, whether a headstone actually exists at a cemetery or not.