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,
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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.
She convinced him to
allow her to take a picture
of his hand over his friend’s
gravestone — a picture
she plans to add to Find a
Grave.
‘Stories to tell’
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