Many mothers and grown daughters like to spend time together, meeting for a day out of shopping and lunch, to visit a museum or go to a movie.
Elaine Moore and Becky Mullen share a mutual interest in cemeteries.
Elaine and Becky are both registered members of Find a Grave, an online database of graves available to the public at no charge. Elaine, who lives in Clinton, concentrates on cemeteries in Henry County, while her daughter, Becky, focuses on St. Clair County, mainly the Appleton City Cemetery. They also cover Bates and Cass counties.
“Mom is really into genealogy,” Becky said. “For me, it’s not so much the genealogy as the history.”
Their goal: to document and maintain accurate records, then make that information available online to people who are researching their family tree. Verifying information and the location of graves requires getting out and walking the cemeteries, comparing what’s inscribed on tombstones with death certificates, and posting photos of the grave markers on the Find a Grave website.
Indexing cemeteries, as it’s called, is an interest that grows to fill your free time, Becky said.
“It’s not a hobby as much as an obsession,” Becky said.
Given the magnitude of the project, it’s one that will keep them occupied for a long time. Englewood has almost 15,000 burials. Appleton City has more than 4,500.
Then there’s the 157 family or chapel cemeteries in Henry County.
So they set doable goals. Becky recently completed the goal of getting all the veterans’ graves in the Appleton City Cemetery marked on Find a Grave. She also wants to make sure all the veterans’ graves are marked on the ground, and notes that the Veterans Administration will provide a marker free of charge.
Elaine said she is about a tenth of the way through marking veterans’ graves on FindaGrave with z “V.” Making sure people’s military service is not forgotten is important, she said, as is proper flag etiquette— only military veterans are entitled to have flags on their graves, she said.
Most of Becky’s ancestors are buried in the city cemetery in Appleton City, where she grew up, except her maternal grandparents, who are in White Oak Cemetery. Between Urich and Montrose, White Oak is named for the nearby creek, and has 751 graves, the oldest dating to 1851.
Elaine said she got into cemetery records 13 years ago when she started tracing the roots of her family, the Miller, Allen, White and Vickers clans. To connect the branches of her family tree, she used photographs and genealogy research other people had posted on FindaGrave, so she thought she’d return the favor.
“If it’s warm outside, I’m in a cemetery,” Elaine said.
If it’s cold out, she and Becky are inside, posting information on Find a Grave. If she and Becky are traveling together, the cemetery is the first place in town they go.
“It tells the whole town’s story,” Becky said.
Elaine has visited cemeteries in every state except Hawaii and Alaska, and said the best ones are in Colorado, because the grave markers have the cause of death on them — “gun shot in a saloon,” or “mining accident.” The Silverton, Colorado, cemetery has a separate section for the ladies of the evening, she said, who are buried under the sobriquet “Sacred Dove.”
Elaine has also visited cemeteries in Puerto Rico, where the graves are above ground, graveyards in Aruba, and has been to the grave of a witch in Louisiana.
According to MOGenWeb, there is no dearth of cemeteries to visit close to home. Of the 157 in Henry County, most are family cemeteries, from Adkins to Woirhaye. Others are associated with chapels. The oldest grave in Henry County is in Stones Chapel Cemetery in Walker Township, which dates back to 1826.
Most old family graveyards are small, and some have been moved and consolidated with other cemeteries. Graves originally in the Drakes Family Cemetery, the oldest dated 1836, were moved to Drakes Chapel Cemetery in 1988. Cecil Cemetery in Springfield Township, south of Calhoun between Calhoun and the Tebo, has only 12 records dating back to 1836. Two people are buried in Harper Cemetery in Tebo Township.
Oak Grove Cemetery, west of the Clinton Square, has graves dating from 1841 to 1899. Cemeteries were frequently named for the type of trees, a creek or other feature of the landscape. In Seven Trees Cemetery in Windsor Township, the trees outnumbered the solitary grave, recorded in 1845.
Cemeteries hold plenty of mystery as well as history. One assumes 1853 was not a good year for the Stallings. Located in Fields Creek Township, north of Clinton, the Stallings Cemetery has only three graves, all dated 1853.
The most enigmatic cemetery in Henry County is the “Unknown Cemetery,” which has records for two dates, 1844 and 1860, but no location or township given. Hall Cemetery and Goodlin in Windsor Township have no records at all, and Hunt Cemetery in Leesville Township has a single stone marked “A.W.S.”
Other mysteries: when death records record people buried in a cemetery, but there is no headstone. One of Becky’s goals is to identify the location of people who were buried in the Appleton City cemetery, but don’t have grave markers of any kind. An estimated 25 people of African-American descent are buried in the Appleton City Cemetery in unmarked graves, Becky said.
“It was really segregated,” she said of the farming community. “There were slaves in St. Clair County in the 1800s.”
Along with local history, the changing style of headstones is another interesting aspect of cemeteries. At Antioch Cemetery, northwest of Clinton in the Fields Creek Township, you can find wonderful old memorial markers dating to 1868. The Freeman Cemetery in Shawnee Township, with 22 records for burials starting in 1861 and going to 1925, holds possibilities for historical research.
Also intriguing is the Montrose Mound Cemetery in Deepwater Township, with 18 records dating from 1857 to 1902 . Elaine and Becky haven’t explored it yet, but said that according to the Missouri Cemetery Association, landowners cannot deny access to graveyards.
“We don’t push it,” Becky said.
Part of the job of indexing graves for FindaGrave is posting the names of the parents of the deceased on the entry, so that genealogy computer programs can connect that person to records of their siblings, Becky said. She also likes to post a copy of the death certificate, so that families researching their family tree have access to the actual document. If the certificate is 50 years old or older, it’s a public record, she said.
Becky lives down the road from the Appleton City Cemetery, south of town. The map for the A.C. cemetery divides it up into areas called wards, but the wards are not marked on the grounds.
“If you don’t know where the grave is, you have to walk that cemetery,” Becky said. “There are 4,576 graves.”
Elaine and Becky have spent months mapping GPS locations of graves by walking a cemetery and dropping a pin at each gravesite. Then they spend long hours on their computers, posting the coordinates on Find a Grave.
People who have the FindaGrave app on their phone can go directly to that location, she said. Their advice to people visiting a cemetery: don’t touch or take things from the gravestones. It is common for people to leave pennies on graves of military veterans as a message to the family that they visited the grave and paid their respects. Rocks are left on graves for the same reason.
People are allowed to cut back vegetation that has grown over a tombstone to make the inscription more visible, Becky said. But there are rules about what can be used to clean headstones, as many chemical substances corrode stone. Their advice to make sure family history isn’t lost: put up a stone, even if the person is cremated. The most durable stone to use is marble, but don’t use household cleaner on it, or you’ll pit the marble.
Putting chalk on a gravestone to make a rubbing of the lettering is also taboo, as chalk is a corrosive material. What you can do: put a piece of paper on the tombstone and use a pencil to rub over the paper, another way to raise the lettering on old gravestones.
The oldest grave in Appleton City Cemetery, just inside the gate, is dated 1862, Becky said, and there are many graves of Civil War soldiers.
The FindaGrave website can also tell you what famous persons are buried in a cemetery. In Englewood, that’s Clement Cabell Dickinson, who moved to Clinton in 1872 and served as a U.S. Congressman in the 1910s, ‘20s and ‘30s.
In addition to indexing cemeteries, Elaine is involved in volunteer work in Clinton with her husband. Both are volunteers with “Operation Barbecue Relief,” based in Peculiar, who deploy to natural disasters to provide food, and also prepare meals for firefighters.
Becky works from home as a clinical care manager. She has been working on the Appleton City Cemetery for four years, she said, and feels like the records are getting into some type of correct shape. She works with the city clerk, and has help from AC Historical Society members and from another person who is interested in documenting the cemetery.
“It’s all volunteer work,” she said.
A census of the A.C. Cemetery was done in 1999, she said, but like immigration, household census and military enlistment records, spelling errors and poor handwriting result in names being changed or being difficult to decipher. She has concerns that no one really knows where all the bodies are buried.
And that is an issue for the community.
“Are we selling plots that have already been sold?” she said. “Are we burying people on top of other people?”
For a break from untangling records in Appleton City, Becky likes to help her mother index Englewood Cemetery, which has beautiful ornamental urns. Another of her favorite cemeteries is Green Lawn, the Rich Hill cemetery, because it holds a lot of history, including the graves of miners who died in accidents. Elaine said she likes White Oak Cemetery best, but Bethlehem Cemetery in Henry County is a favorite with both of them.
Find a Grave, which was created by community volunteers, has more than 226 million memorial records. To find an ancestor, go to findagrave.com, and enter the full name of the person. Additional biographical information will narrow down the search: the year the person was born and the date of death, either the exact date, approximate or best guess within parameters. Where the person was residing at the close of their life also provides a clue to the cemetery where they, hopefully, rest in peace.
