Six years ago, Robert Franke’s heart doctor suggested he get more exercise.
Some would have received that news and headed to the golf course or pickleball court.
Franke headed for the closest cemetery.
There he pursued his new calling as a Find a Grave volunteer — or “graver,” as some of them refer to themselves — finding, photographing, and uploading the grave markers of the previously non-digitized deceased.
In this often solitary pastime, Franke became a member of the vast community of like-minded volunteers, responding to online requests from people who may live too far away from graves to visit them.
Perhaps 20% of the requesters acknowledge the time and attention Franke has given to locating a deceased person who is quite likely a stranger to him.
“I believe they are truly thankful,” he said.
The gravers’ work is poignant throughout the year, but can take on slightly more gravity when searching for the final resting place of military men and women.
Such was the case during Memorial Day weekend, when small flags dotted the grounds of Kansas City area cemeteries, with family members honoring the sacrifices of deceased veterans.
“These volunteers are the unsung heroes of genealogy,” said Chelsea Clarke, an assistant manager of the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence
“With their tireless hours in the field, walking through cemeteries and taking pictures, they are the glue that holds genealogy research together.”
Salt Lake City resident Jim Tipton started Find A Grave in 1995 after teaching himself Hypertext Markup Language, the web programming language known as HTML. He posted a photo of a gravestone.
“It just said ‘Waldo’ and I said ‘I found him,’ “ Tipton told a Kansas City Star reporter in 2006. “A few people sent it around.”
Tipton also had a thing for photographing celebrity gravesites. He began posting those; soon, online visitors started uploading their own.
By 2006, Tipton claimed the site attracted 45,000 visitors a day.
In 2010, the site began posting gravestone photos of the uncelebrated. Three years later, Ancestry, Inc. — the genealogy database that claims to contain billions of historical records — acquired it.
Today, Find A Grave offers what it calls a “virtual cemetery experience” for those seeking information regarding the “final disposition” of individuals, famous or otherwise.
Kansas City area graves available on Find A Grave include the:
- Forest Hill Cemetery monument to Negro Leagues legend Leroy “Satchel” Paige, which includes the “Six Rules for Staying Young” often attributed to him (Number Six: “Don’t Look Back, Something May Be Gaining On You.”)
- Sheffield Cemetery gravestone of actor and Kansas City native Ed Asner, whose grave marker reads in part “HE HAD SPUNK” — a nod to one of his most famous lines as Lou Grant in the “Mary Tyler Moore” show.
- Mount Moriah Cemetery grave marker of news anchor Walter Cronkite, whose memorial makes no mention of his journalism career but lists the name of his wife Mary, often known as Betsy.
Yet folks like Franke more often than not search for the graves of lesser luminaries whose memories are nonetheless special to Find A Grave users.
His Find a Grave profile page credits him, as of Sunday, with taking and uploading 3,522 photos over six years, 11 months and seven days. The retired AT&T information management specialist for many years taught a course about selling on eBay; he knows his way around the web.
'Needle in the haystack'
Franke said one initial challenge can be figuring out the cemetery where the grave is supposed to be.
The first stop is often the Missouri Secretary of State website, which lists state death certificates from 1910 through 1974.
Yet these documents can be unreliable.
“Sometimes the death certificate will say ‘Calvary’ when it should be ‘Forest Hill,’ “ Franke said.
Forest Hill and Calvary cemeteries, at 6901 Troost Ave., are separate memorial parks under the same management. But volunteers could waste hours wandering the wrong one, Franke said.
Another challenge: how the cemetery was designed. More recent cemeteries may feature curbs with numbers and letters denoting specific sections.
Others, like Woodlawn Cemetery in Independence at 701 S. Noland Road — the oldest cemetery in continual use in Jackson County — may have those, too.
But Woodlawn dates to 1837. Small stone markers placed near the cemetery’s narrow rock roads may have lost to time any visible letter or number.
That’s one issue that kept Deborah Wade of Independence — who visited Woodlawn during the Memorial Day weekend — walking and looking.
She had come to Woodlawn with her spreadsheet of 88 names printed out from the Find A Grave website.
Wade quickly found two. Both were graves of service members buried on what is called “Soldiers Hill” at Woodlawn.
Two other Woodlawn graves, however, eluded Wade.
One was the grave of Daisy McAnally. The listed information included only Daisy’s birth and death dates — both in 1927. “Maybe she died at birth,” Wade said.
The Find A Grave request for Daisy included precise coordinates; her remains were interred in Block 22, Section Six, Division One, Lot Five.
“This is where she should be,” Wade said, stepping lightly across a small section dotted with several grave markers bearing the same surname. One did bear Daisy’s name — but this Daisy died in 1982.
Like Franke, Wade — an Independence pharmaceutical industry quality control chemist — knows her way around the web.
A quick visit to the Missouri death certificates website told the sad story. Daisy was born July 11, 1915, and died on July 15, with interment in Woodlawn Cemetery the following day.
The cause of death listed was “cyanosis,” a condition recognized by the bluish-purple cast of an infant’s skin, and often attributed to abnormalities of the heart.
“The poor baby only lived four days,” Wade said.
During earlier online research, Wade had found the infant’s parents as well as other relatives, and also the funeral home that prepared Daisy’s body for burial.
Yet the mystery of Daisy’s missing memorial will require still more online research time, Wade said.
“Then it will be back to the cemetery with a metal rod to see if the stone may be buried by grass or time,” she added.
That, Wade added, is just how it sometimes goes. There’s another gravestone she can’t find.
“The gravestone dates to the 1880s,” she said. “It has been my needle in the haystack for more than a year now,” she said. “But I will find that gravestone.”
Why so adamant? The request on Find A Grave came with this extra information: “I’m in California, and 70 yrs old, so not likely to get there soon,” it read.
The note gave Wade the motivation to keep looking.
“Look,” she said. “This is volunteer. It’s kind of what you do, paying it forward. You want to be out there helping people.”
The request also reminded Wade of another unfound grave — that of one of her grandmothers, in Chicago. She had submitted a request and eventually got the information she was looking for — but not in the way she expected.
A Find A Grave volunteer in Chicago emailed Wade, saying she had looked for her grandmother’s grave for two weeks but couldn’t find her.
That inspired Wade to answer that beyond-the-call-of-duty effort with one of her own. She dug harder into her own family history.
“I learned that this grandmother had been cremated, with her ashes being buried at her own mother’s gravesite,” she said.
‘“But I was so thankful to that person who looked for two weeks. She could have just given up and not responded. But she wrote back to me.”
Both Wade and Franke honor Find A Grave protocols. For example, the website advises volunteers not to disturb the grave markers.
Wade gets this. “Some of the older stone markers are kind of crumbly, and I would hate to do more damage to them,” she said.
Franke, meanwhile, allows himself some latitude. “Grass grows, weeds grow,” he said.
“I carry a little tote bag with a pair of scissors. I try to clean things up so you can read the names and any other information on the marker. Sometimes it just means brushing some grass if the cemetery recently has been mowed.”
Other times, however, Franke will find the plot overgrown with green.
In those cases, Franke has uploaded a before and after photo to illustrate his handiwork.
There are plenty of times that Franke, like Wade, comes up empty.
On a recent morning he drove to a specific slope in Forest Hill Cemetery to find what was supposed to be the location of the grave marker of Frank Warner, a son of Ben W. Warner, who had served as a private in a Michigan infantry company during the Civil War and had been buried in Forest Hill in 1920.
The Forest Hill office associates had given him information on Warner’s wife and son.
But Franke found no stones for them.
“Not everybody has a marker,” he said. “And without a marker, it’s tough to know if we just stepped on them or not.”
Sometimes Franke wonders whether he has received some unexplained assistance in finding the thousands of graves he has photographed.
“There’s nothing macabre about this,” he said. “It’s a cheap hobby. And it gets me out of the house for an hour or two.”
“And I’ll be wandering around, and then stopping because I can’t find someone. Then I’ll stop and start over. And maybe I’ll start a third time.
“But then I will just turn around and look over my shoulder — and there it is.
“And so I am not a religious person. But in those moments, I will be telling myself, ‘Well, somebody had to be helping me there. Because I was not going to find that person otherwise.’”
This story was originally published by Flatland, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
