Woodburn Cemetery using ground penetrating radar to find unmarked graves
WOODBURN, Ky. – The Woodburn Cemetery is home to between 2,000 and 2,100 graves. However, not all of them have been marked.
Recently, the cemetery has been working with the Simpson County Historical Society to utilize a ground penetrating radar to help find some of these unmarked graves. The idea to use this radar came years ago, when historical society realized that there are around 20 missing cemeteries dotted all around Simpson County.
“We started this program at the Simpson County Historical Society because we’ve noticed in our county alone, that we have over 20 missing cemeteries in our county and that’s due to development, farming, overgrowth, just Mother Nature, more or less. So we end up investing in a use GBR years ago to help locate these old cemeteries that we are missing,” said Billy Wilkerson, the operations manager for the Simpson County Historical Society.
When the cemetery first opened, grave memorials and headstones were not available to many who died due to the high cost there. This has led to many unmarked graves to fill the cemetery, with records only being kept in an old book.
“I don’t know what to do or what I would like. I just kind of put them where they wanted to. But we’ve had records back many years ago that was there’s still kind of a scrapbook. And then we took information from that and tried to, see just exactly what we had. And then we went from there and talking to families and stuff, you know, to get more information,” said John Matthews, a volunteer with the Woodburn Cemetery.
The board of the cemetery, however, is working hard to not just find these unmarked graves, but also to identify those who might be buried there, which sometimes requires detective work to find those names.
“If there was one for like, a John and Jane Doe, and there was an unknown beside it, and then the death records show that they had an infant. You can pretty much be sure that that’s where they had buried their infant. Their family is together. So we were able to find names for that infant and then give that grave, you know, a name to be associated with the grave,” said Linda Dickerson, chairperson for the Woodburn Cemetery Inc.
The ground penetrating radar also serves another purpose, marking plots that are now unavailable for burial, but finding others that are unused that are still available for Woodburn residents to use when their loved ones pass away.
