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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (March 17, 2017)
6A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2017 Cemetery: ‘I kept meeting people out there who had stories to tell’ Continued from Page 1A In all, Judy Bearman took more than 11,000 photos and created almost 10,000 Find A Grave “memorials,” web- site pages devoted to indi- vidual interments. In many cases, more than one body lies beneath a headstone, so some memorials feature the same photo. Though some memo- rials for Ocean View burials already existed, most didn’t have photos until Bearman added them. Now every stone at Ocean View has been photographed. “We have checked and dou- ble-checked,” she said. Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian Thomas Bearman demonstrates how he cleans the moss off headstones before his wife Judy Bearman photographs the headstone for the Find A Grave website Wednesday at Ocean View Cemetery in Warrenton. Detective work The city’s parks staff gave Bearman access to burial records stored in the chapel atop the cemetery. “With- out that, I probably would’ve given up on the project,” she said. In addition, the parks department’s online Ocean View Cemetery map and cat- alogue, which she called a “life saver,” helped her fi ll in the gaps, like names on the oldest grave markers that had become illegible. “There was a lot of detective work to it,” she said. The city keeps a digi- tal database and hard -copy records of burials, but, before Bearman came along, had no documentation of on-the- ground pictures of Ocean View Cemetery. “So it’s a pretty signifi cant amount of information that she’s gath- ered,” Jonah Dart-McL ean, Astoria’s parks maintenance supervisor, said. Users can notify Bearman through Find a Grave if she made an error entering infor- mation and needs to correct it. “When you’re talking 11,000 stones, you’re going to make a mistake sometime,” she said. Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian Judy Bearman looks at a map of the Ocean View Cemetery in Warrenton where she has been working on her Find A Grave project creating a digital database for all the head- stones in the cemetery. Find more photos online at DailyAstorian.com ‘Doing them a service’ Thomas Bearman has rel- atives buried at Ocean View, including his grandparents Charles Bearman (1887 to 1967) and Anna Bearman (1886 to 1960), both of who emigrated from Finland and met in Astoria. “That’s how the family got started over here,” Thomas Bearman said. He said he enjoyed work- ing with Judy on the Find A Grave project, and doing what they could for those who have passed on. “It just felt like I was doing them a service,” he said. Judy Bearman, a geologi- cal enthusiast originally from Raymond , Washington, con- nected with Find A Grave years ago when she traced her ancestry from England and Germany. She said the Ocean View Cemetery project acquired a spiritual aspect as she moved among the old headstones. MORE ONLINE See the Ocean View Cemetery listings on Find a Grave at http://bit.ly/2my50uV She felt connected to the his- tory, and became increasingly interested in the lives beneath her feet — and the circum- stances of their death. “Sometimes I could fi nd an obituary, and it just made them so real,” she said. Find A Grave, a valuable resource for genealogists, helped her piece together the stories of the deceased. “Every little bit is a clue,” she said. “Sometimes we would just linger over a grave and try to imagine what hap- pened here.” A family of four from Astoria, Bearman noticed, W A NTED Alder and Maple Saw Logs & Standing Timber N orth w es t H a rdw oods • Lon gview , W A We’re Hiring! died on the same day. She Googled them, and discov- ered in a Daily Astorian arti- cle that they had all died in a house fi re. Now, the Bearmans are helping the city uncover hid- den graves in Block 38 on the cemetery’s sloping east side. In that section of the 118-year-old cemetery, some tombstones have shifted and sunk into the sandy soil, or have become overrun with weeds, moss and debris. The Bearmans and their friend, Carl Hagnas of Warrenton, are working to locate these graves using cemetery records and a rod that can probe deeply into the earth. has relatives interred at Ocean View, but that no longer lives in the area, was unhappy that Bearman posted a photo of the family’s tombstone. They contacted Bearman to express their displeasure, even though her photo was clearly superior to the existing one . But, in general, the fam- ilies have been kind about it and appreciate her work. “It turned out to be just this fantastic experience because I kept meeting people out there who had stories to tell,” she said. One day, early on in the project, Bearman was at the cemetery alone, taking photos down by Cemetery Lake and saw an older gentleman sit- ting on the ground and scrap- ing moss off a headstone. She could tell he was “turning something over in his heart,” she said. She kept taking pictures around him, moving closer and closer, but trying not to disturb him. Finally, she approached him. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, but I just want to thank you for taking the time to clean off your family’s stone,” she said, observing that there are many stones in the cemetery that nobody does that for. “And he says, ‘Well, actu- ally it’s not family.’ And I said, ‘Oh,’” Bearman remembered. “He says, ‘Yeah … Fishing season opened the other day, and this is my fi shing buddy. And I really miss him.’” Bearman saw two lit- tle fl owers in his hand and almost cried. “He was just sit- ting there, probably remem- bering fun fi shing trips,” she said. 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