The search for John Richardson leads here, to Sierra Madre, to a cemetery shaded by magnolia trees, to a grassy knoll covered with sunny yellow wildflowers.
His name is on the door, so to speak--on the cemetery's black wrought-iron gate, on a plaque noting that "John Richardson, a Civil War veteran," was the first to be buried here in 1884. But it's not clear where.
Richardson is the great-great-great-grandfather of a 35-year-old Tacoma, Wash., woman named Holly Brandt Smith, and she has been looking for him.
On Smith's behalf, at the 2 1/3-acre Sierra Madre Pioneer Cemetery, Covina resident Penny Dodd has picked up the trail. She is a grave hunter extraordinaire.
"I love cemeteries," Dodd says. "I know it sounds weird, but I do."
Lucky for family historians that she does.
Strangers like Smith will contact her and ask if she knows about their great-this or great-great-that. They figure she knows where the bodies are buried; she's a volunteer for the nationwide Tombstone Project.
In 44 states, volunteers are transcribing tombstones and recording cemetery logs on the Tombstone Project's Web site (http://www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery/). It is the first project of its kind, coordinators say. For family genealogists, the site can be the last stop on a long ancestral trail.
A new generation of online family researchers is tapping into the Internet's exhaustive genealogical resources. The Web is taking people places that family genealogists used to get to by footwork. Online, for instance, you can find the West Boylston, Mass., census of 1870, and Jefferson County, Miss., wills from 1800 to 1833. First, though, you must plow through the ages via birth, census, death and other records before you can hope to find a generations-old burial plot.
So by the time you make it to the Tombstone Project's Web site, it's a heart-thumping wait while you scroll through the cemetery listings, the way Smith did two months ago.
She got there because of a Civil War fife.
Fife Is Link to Family Past
The fife was a Smith family heirloom.
Last Christmas, at her parents' home in Northern California, Smith and her 84-year-old grandmother got to talking and looking through old family photos. The name of Holly Brandt Smith's great-great-grandfather came up--James Monroe Smith.
The family knew he had fought with the 1st Michigan Cavalry and played a fife, or small flute.
