Buried stories: Anonymous, but not forgotten

Apr. 14—FIFE LAKE — As she walks the hallowed grounds of Fife Lake Cemetery, sexton Lisa Plamondon is haunted by the anonymous dead.

Pausing at Lot No. 59, she points to a spot where ground-penetrating radar and archival records suggest that Byron A. Rogers, a blind Civil War veteran, was buried after dying at the Michigan Soldier's Home in Grand Rapids in 1914.

Other than a slight indentation in the ground, there's nothing there that identifies this spot as the 66-year-old Union soldier's final resting place. No headstone or other grave marker, not even a rock.

A pair of Western Union telegrams housed at the Fife Lake Historical Society help to document how Rogers' body ended up in Fife Lake.

In a message addressed to "Any Rogers, Fife Lake, Mich.," the writer wrote, "Byron A. Rogers died last night. When and where do you wish burial." A few days later, another telegram, addressed to Fife Lake undertaker W.W. Brower, reported, "Body of Byron Rogers leaves tomorrow at 7:15."

In a project that has taken years of painstaking research, Plamondon, 60, a retired UPS driver who began taking photographs at Fife Lake Cemetery in 2016 for the website Find A Grave, has been trying to identify the remains of 312 people like Rogers who were buried here without a headstone or any other marker to verify their existence.

It makes her sad to know that men who served their country essentially disappeared without a trace, but she also embraces the challenge. Aware that the Department of Veterans Affairs provides headstones at no charge for deceased veterans, Plamondon is in the process of requesting them for Rogers and the 10 other Civil War veterans who lie in unmarked graves.

After the village rented a GPR unit in 2018 and identified the locations of all of the cemetery's unmarked graves, Plamondon temporarily staked each burial spot so that Fife Lake residents could see how many of their ancestors were anonymous and unmourned.

"I wanted a visual of 312 wooden stakes here to show people, 'This is your cemetery; these are our people,'" she said. "This is a big part of our community here. These are our founding mothers and fathers."

The stories of their lives fascinate Plamondon and Cathy Sorrow, the township's treasurer, who sometimes assists Plamondon.

Those stories include the discovery that brothers John and William Gilde were buried next to the marked graves of their grandparents, Adrian and Minnie Gilde. The brothers' obituary says that John, 13, and William, 8, died in December 1921 when they went rabbit hunting, got lost during a freak blizzard and froze to death in each other's arms.

Plamondon said the boys' distraught parents moved to Grand Rapids and are buried there. Captivated by Plamondon's disclosure that John and William were buried together in a single casket next to their grandparents in Fife Lake Cemetery, a businessman from Kingsley bought a flagstone that now marks the brothers' gravesite, Plamondon said.

Occasionally, she said, she has even found a distant survivor of someone who had been buried in an unmarked grave.

One day, Craig Bridson, the Fife Lake Historical Society's curator, mentioned that he had ancestors with the last name of Huff or Leaderson buried at the cemetery. Plamondon said there were several Huffs interred there, but that the graves were all accounted for. However, she said she found an old map indicating that four members of a family named Luderson were buried there.

Noting that names on official documents were often misspelled and that Leaderson and Luderson are phonetically similar, Bridson said he learned that Alva Leaderson — the brother of his second great-grandmother, Carrie Leaderson Huff — had been buried in Fife Lake Cemetery after dying from what his obituary listed as "consumption" (i.e., tuberculosis) at age 21 in 1900.

"I was pretty ecstatic," he said.

Discoveries like that have encouraged Plamondon to keep up her efforts. Utilizing ancestry.com, familysearch.com and obituaries, census records and old newspaper stories, she says she has now identified all but about 60 of the original 312 anonymous people who are buried in Fife Lake Cemetery.

"I go through my list," she said. "I start with A. When I get to Z, it's two years later and I go back to A again."

In the meantime, Plamondon continues to chase ghosts, ambling up and down the hilly 7-acre cemetery, quietly talking to people she never knew, but whose lives she honors.

"The vets, I brush their headstones and say, 'Thank you for your service,' " she said. "Some of the women who are buried here were fierce. It was hard living here."