Volunteers help serve as grave finders

MANKATO, Minn. (KEYC) - Cemetery records aren’t as up-to-date as needed in some locations, especially rural cemeteries.

Volunteers such as Melissa Anne, better known as Joyfulpeace on the website Find a Grave, take it upon themselves to find graves to identify and map their location, using GPS.

“We create files so that people can know where they are buried and what their marker looks like, and maybe some other basic information that they’d like to share,” Joyfulpeace said.

She started marking graves after receiving old family records of her late mother. After only a year of serious dedication, she has posted more than 20,000 photos and identified over 3,000 memorials.

“And I just got hooked in walking cemeteries and finding a way to serve and help people reconnect or be connected to their family,” Joyfulpeace said.

And according to her, this work is crucial as these cemeteries don’t have the people necessary to keep the records, or mother nature overtakes the markers.

“Beauty of this assignment is you learn so much history and so much about the times in which they lived and that we live today and the differences,” Joyfulpeace said.

She says it’s fun for her piecing together people’s lives.

“I feel like I’m a mystery detective. It gets very interesting because when women remarry after an early death of their husband then I have to look for a different name,” Joyfulpeace said.

All that is truly needed is a photo of the marker, the name and the birth and death record. But thanks to online records, there are places for additional information for those who want to go the extra mile, but the work starts at the cemetery.

“And if you like to be outdoors, you like to give some service. This is a wonderful volunteer opportunity,” she said.

Even an hour or two of spare time will help, with rural cemeteries being a great place to start.

Find a Grave is just one of many sites that are used to identify and mark memorials on mapping technology like GPS. Some cemeteries, such as Minneopa Cemetery, offer identification services on their websites making it easier to find the grave markers.

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