Grays Harbor pair finding out where all the bodies are buried

ABERDEEN - Although they count the number (and names) of people in a specific location, Vicki Fenton of Aberdeen and Gordon Love of Satsop aren't your everyday, run-of-the-mill census takers.

For the past five years, the two, members of the Grays Harbor Genealogical Society, have been researching interments in several Grays Harbor burial sites.

They started with the Humptulips Cemetery, then moved on to St. John's in the Wishkah Valley and have just completed a "census" on the 1,241 grave sites in the Satsop Cemetery.

Fenton, 73, president-elect of the Genealogical Society, and Love, 81, a retired controller for Evans Products of Aberdeen, searched out cemetery and other kinds of records, talking with anyone who might know something about a burial place - and they "walked the cemeteries."

The information they gleaned from their extensive research has been included in three softbound books, one for each burial place.

The book on the Satsop Cemetery was released in November; the Humptulips volume was completed in September of 1998; and the one on St. John's Cemetery was finished last April.

The first project undertaken by the two Harborites, both of whose spouses are deceased, was the Humptulips Cemetery. It was "a labor of love," said Fenton, a 1943 Lake Quinault High School graduate who grew up in Humptulips.

Her mother, Jane Sandberg, taught in the little one-room Humptulips School for 16 years, and Fenton's brother, John, helped dig some of the graves in the cemetery, she said.

That book begins with a county plat map of the cemetery.

The surnames of the 176 people buried there are alphabetized in the next section of the book, with available birth dates, dates of death and the lot number of each gravesite also noted.

Newspaper obituaries for many, including some people who aren't buried there but had solid connections with the area, are included in another section of the book.

A lot-number index of grave sites makes up a separate segment, and another section details inscriptions on the gravestones. A listing of lot owners is also included.

The Humptulips book is the only one with obituaries, however. Rounding them up was a huge undertaking, Fenton said, and was done only because the area had been been her childhood home.

"I could stand at the grave sites and tell stories about most of the families that are buried there," said the retired Grays Harbor College secretary.

Ironically, Fenton said, her brother noticed that she and Love had forgotten to include an obituary for her mother in the Humptulips book.

"It's the forest and the trees," she chuckled about the oversight.

The next two books, sans obituaries, contain a wealth of information, nevertheless.

The earliest grave the two cemetery detectives found in the Humptulips Cemetery was that of Roy N. Newnham, dated Jan. 28, 1892.

In St. John's, the earliest among the 172 interments the researchers found was for Casimer Scepanski (spelled "Kajmiesr Szczespanski" on his death certificate) from 1909.

In Satsop, the oldest gravesite is dated March 20, 1907, for an infant boy with the surname of Ray.

Interments are still taking place in all three cemeteries.

The cost of printing the books is borne by the Genealogical Society, Fenton said, "and Gordon and I give a lot of our time and energy.

A labor of love

"But we do it because we want to. This has never been an assignment."

When asked why she had undertaken such a gigantic job, Fenton said, "I'm not sure that I know, except that it is so interesting. Cemeteries are storehouses of history."

Love, a man of few words, indicated he got hooked unexpectedly. He had offered simply to man the computer for the first project . . . and from there, "I just went along," said the Minnesota native, grinning.

"That's our brain," the grandfather of nine said of the computer in Fenton's cozy living room.

Next, the two plan to catalog the Lake Quinault and John's River cemeteries.

But they're not in a big rush.

"We do these when we have a chance," Fenton said.

They're concentrating mostly on outlying cemeteries that don't have offices or someone on site. "Some of these outlying ones - I don't know how people would ever find out who had records," Fenton said.

Graveyard once overgrown

A case in point is the little John's River graveyard in Markham. According to the county plat map, the plat was filed for record on Aug. 30, 1889, at what appears to be "the request of Milton D. Markham," Fenton said.

Most of the graves and their stones were almost completely overgrown at one time, "so there may be a lot more burials than we know about, certainly more than are marked there."

Though the cemetery itself has been cleared recently, to get to the little graveyard still takes a hike of about two wooded miles.

To the two researchers, however, it's well worth the effort, especially in light of the history burial sites contain.

"They are so intertwined, cemeteries and history," Fenton said.

All three books, the pages of which were photocopied, then bound at an office supply business in Elma, are available in the genealogy section of the Aberdeen Timberland Library.

The first two cemetery books are also available at the Hoquiam Timberland Library.