Volunteer ‘gravers’ document history through headstones By LISA GUTIERREZ The Kansas City Star Findagrave volunteer Deana Logan tries to estimate the location of a grave. Logan, a self-described “cemetery freak,” is saddened when she sees aging gravesites because she knows that if someone doesn’t record the information, it could be lost forever.   Under a drippy May sky, Deana Logan slogs through the damp grass of Maple Hill Cemetery. She’s on the prowl.   She’s hunting for a husband and wife long dead, Roy and Molly Felshaw. She sort of knows where they are because the nice lady at the cemetery office showed her on a map where to look.   Logan knows the layout of Maple Hill in Kansas City, Kan. — where the Gates barbecue family has relatives buried — because she has walked it many times before. Roy is buried in Block 28, about 20 feet north of the road and nine rows to the east. There’s a marker on top of his grave. But there’s no such luck with Molly. Her final resting place, way across the cemetery, is unmarked.   Logan doesn’t know the Felshaws. She is hunting for them because one of their relatives sent her a request on Findagrave.com, a free website popular with genealogists that maintains millions of grave records worldwide.   More than 50,000 people search the website every day, according to its estimates. All that data exist because of an army of volunteers across the country, including former church secretary Logan and countless others in the Kansas City area. They call themselves “gravers.”   Logan calls herself a “cemetery freak.”   More than just a hobby   Maybe you’ve seen them in the cemeteries. They’re the people taking photos of headstones that they will eventually post to Findagrave. (You probably won’t see them this Memorial Day weekend; they tend to avoid the busy cemetery holidays out of respect for visitors.)   Some of them work from home, downloading obituary information from their local newspapers onto the website to create “memorials” for the newly departed.   The most dedicated volunteers spend hours a week working on their grave interventions. You can see the fruit of their labor because Findagrave keeps track of and posts the number of photos and memorials each volunteer submits.   Logan’s numbers to date: 15,726 memorials added; 3,886 photos posted. But, she says, she has thousands more photos that she hasn’t had time to post yet.   It’s addictive, she says. Take one picture of a tombstone, and pretty soon you’re taking another and another.   “The next time you’re out there visiting Dad,” she says, “take a picture of the two or three people immediately surrounding him, and eventually you will catch the bug and you’ll be photographing the whole dang cemetery.   “And then you’ll get weird, and pretty soon you’re photographing the entire county.” This is more than just an odd hobby, though. Gravers consider themselves preservationists. Tombstones can reveal key information often lost to families, everything from birthplaces and religious affiliations to names of spouses and marriage dates.   That puts flesh on the bare bones of facts, one local volunteer says. And if all that information isn’t preserved before the tombstone turns to dust, it’s lost forever.   “When you step into the old cemeteries that are falling apart, you can see that they’re literally crumbling in front of our eyes,” says Logan, who lives in Kansas City, Kan.   “And in a matter of years, they’re going to be gone. And as a genealogist, a wayward genealogist, that is sad, because in a decade someone who is just getting started looking for their family is not going to be able to find them. But I can find them today.”   Just a thanks will do   “If you go to Findagrave, you can search 45 million grave records,” says genealogy buff Steve Jones, former owner of Midwest Hanger Co. “And all those records are put in by people like me.”   The Northland businessman is listed as a “top contributor” on Findagrave for submitting more than 10,000 photos of gravesites over the last eight years.   Any day when the weather is nice, Jones jumps into his car with his point-and-shoot camera, his trusty smooth fox terrier Blackie occasionally at his side, and travels to cemeteries in and around Kansas City.   “I’m kind of a semi-retired business owner, so I have quite a bit of free time,” Jones says. “If it’s a nice day, I like to go out so I can spend some time outside and get some exercise and help somebody find a relative they didn’t know. I don’t get paid or reimbursed for expenses. I don’t get anything out of it except people thank me.”   Jones likes photographing graves in small, out-of-the-way cemeteries. He tends to avoid the huge ones because some charge nonrelatives as much as $50 for grave location information.   He has taken about 200 photos at Leavenworth National Cemetery, too, where the Vietnam Army vet says he might be buried someday.   He caught the genealogy bug a few years ago when he discovered that he had family on the Mayflower. But he’s most proud of the 2,304 photo requests he has fulfilled from people looking for relatives’ graves in these parts.   “Most of these are from people who are way outside of this area, and they know they’ll never get back here, but they’d like to see what their great-grandfather’s stone looks like,” Jones says.   ‘It’s a little different’   Hether Pillman doesn’t tell many people her secret: She has been a Findagrave contributor for more than a year now.   She sits down at her laptop computer twice a day to do her Findagrave work.   Before 7 a.m., when her day-care charges arrive at her home in Fairway, then again while they’re napping in the afternoon, she creates “memorials” by posting obituaries that have caught her eye in the morning newspaper.   At least a couple of weekends a month, she’s in the cemeteries taking pictures, too, though she feels shy doing it when other people are around.   “I don’t really talk about it,” says Pillman, a mother of three. “Once people find out you go to cemeteries and take pictures, they think it’s a little different. And it probably is.”   Genealogy is in her blood, though. On vacations when she was a little girl, her dad would stop at courthouses and rifle through census and land records while she and her sister “would just sit and amuse ourselves.”   She found Findagrave through a Google search a few years ago when she began researching her husband’s family tree.   “I guess I’m doing strangers’ genealogy,” Pillman says. “Some of these people have just an amazing history, and it’s like they come alive to you. I find that you feel connected when you find their grave.   “I think they would want to be remembered. I would think we would all want to be remembered. When you see a stone, and it’s been there forever and there are no flowers, I feel so bad.   “Maybe no one knows they’re buried there. It makes me sad.”   Barefoot she walks   Deana Logan has walked the block of Maple Hill where Molly Felshaw is buried several times before. So it’s no surprise that the grave is not marked.   Though it’s raining, Logan kicks off her shoes and leaves them under a tree as she walks down the row where Molly is said to be. She often works barefoot like this. She likes the cushiony feel of cemetery grass under her feet.   When she’s “graving,” Logan carries a little canvas bag of supplies with her. A brush she can use to wipe away leaves and grass clippings from the stones. Clippers to cut grass that gets in the way of her picture.   And if she’s taking a photo to fulfill a specific request, she whips out a bottle of water and spritzes off the bird poop.   In just a few minutes, she has found Molly and takes a picture of, well, nothing. Molly lies in a grassy spot between two headstones — Mieth and Spencer.   Logan holds her camera high above her head to take an overhead photo of the bare spot.   Here lies Molly Felshaw.   Logan’s work is done.