Retired professor helps genealogists leave no stone unturned

During the past two years, Sheaffer has visited dozens of cemeteries and estimates that he’s taken and published between 12,000-13,000 photographs of gravestones.

Sheaffer’s effort began after a pair of volunteers at the Dawes County Historical Museum, Belle Lecher and Theresa Bright, had been receiving numerous requests from family researchers for gravestone photographs. They suggested to Sheaffer that he might shoot a few photographs of gravestones in the area. “In a weak moment, I said, ‘OK,’” he said with a laugh.

Almost all of the photos are published at www.nebraskagravestones.org, a site devoted to pictures of the state’s graveyards. Sheaffer said Nebraska is one of 10 or fewer states that has a Web site for gravestone photographs. The sites are primarily used by genealogists looking to expand their information.

At age 78, the retired professor has embraced technology in his endeavor. He uses a digital camera to capture the images and a desktop computer to upload them to the site. Because of limited disk space on his computer, he burns images to CDs for storage. For the more obscure gravesites in rural areas, he uses a GPS unit to obtain a stone’s precise latitude and longitude coordinates for future visitors.

Sheaffer, who taught political science courses at Chadron State for 41 years and was a member of the Chadron City Council, takes interest in the historical aspect of the stones.

“You can tell a lot about a town’s ancestry by visiting its cemeteries,” he said. “I’ve photographed many stones with German and Czech inscriptions.”

The vast majority of the photos are posted to the site with the most basic information available. For stones with more colorful backgrounds, Sheaffer’s taken time to elaborate.

Some of the stones are a story within themselves. One grave north of Chadron stands alone after being left behind when Chadron’s Catholic cemetery was moved at the turn of the 20th Century. According to reports, it wasn’t moved because the person who is buried there committed suicide after being injured by an accidental self-inflicted gunshot.

Another lone stone is believed to be that of an American Indian woman whose remains were unearthed in 1923 during the excavation of West Ash Creek Road in Dawes County. Residents from the area constructed a satin-lined wooden coffin and conducted a reburial ceremony. The county commissioners erected the gravestone, which bears their names.

Sheaffer has made a special effort to photograph the stones of some notable Nebraskans. Earlier this month, he drove to the Sheridan County site where acclaimed author Mari Sandoz is buried. While traveling through McCook en route to a Rotary meeting, he photographed the gravestone of U.S. Sen.George Norris.

The site’s state administrator, Gail Kilgore of Casa Grande, Ariz., has been impressed by Sheaffer’s work toward the site and has given him some maintenance duties. Sheaffer gives approval to other submissions before they become “live” on the site. The submission process is open to anyone.

“Many of the submissions are from people who have taken just a few photos of their family’s stones,” he said. “When I photograph a gravestone, I usually know nothing about the person who is buried at that place, but I’m sure somebody out there is interested in it.”

Kilgore has never met Sheaffer in person, but regularly corresponds with him by e-mail. She hopes to thank him in person someday for his contributions.

“He has done a fantastic job with the project and has been so meticulous about gathering information,” said Kilgore, who has relatives in Nebraska. “This is a project that not everyone can do and it takes a special person with a devotion and interest to complete such a task.”

Sheaffer said he’s received about two dozen e-mails from people, mostly thanking him for his work, others providing additional information, and a few to correct typographical errors.

The project has kept the retired professor busy.

“I remember putting my first photo on the site. The site showed that it was the 77th photo uploaded,” he said. “Now, there are more than 16,000 photos on there.”

The great majority of the photos were taken by Sheaffer. Northwest Nebraska is by far the best-represented region on the site. Although Sheaffer’s focus has been the area closest to home, he’s taken photos of graveyards throughout the state.

Sheaffer said he’s photographed every gravestone in Dawes County, with the exception of some lone markers in rural areas and one cemetery on private land in which the landowner is reluctant to allow the photos to be published on the Internet. Sheaffer’s extensive collection includes photos of every stone in Chadron’s Greenwood Cemetery, more than 5,500 images, two other Dawes County cemeteries with more than 1,000 stones each, and various quantities at 17 other locations in the county.

Nebraska’s most populated county, Douglas, has just 1,406 images. If it weren’t for Sheaffer, most of those wouldn’t be there, either. He submitted more than 1,200 of them after stopping over at Mount Auburn Cemetery while visiting a daughter who lives in Omaha.

His gravestone photography hasn’t been limited to the Cornhusker State.

He said Iowa, where he was raised, has the most extensive Web site of gravestone photographs of any state. He recently photographed the cemetery there in which many of his family members are buried.

Sheaffer, known as a world traveler, accompanied a group to New Orleans for a Hurricane Katrina relief effort earlier this year. While there, he and others viewed the storm-ravaged above-ground gravesites there. He has pictures of them.

“It doesn’t take nearly as much time to shoot the photos as it does to download them to the computer and upload them to the Web site,” he said.

With a high-speed connection, Sheaffer said he can submit 40-45 images per hour. That’s somewhere between 266 and 325 hours he’s spent at the computer for this project. Sheaffer isn’t counting the hours, though.

“This is something I believe is worthwhile and is interesting,” he said.

The professor’s wife, June, has even gotten into the act. She accompanies him on the trips and has recently started taking photos with a camera on loan from the Dawes County Historical Museum.

“It really helps speed things up when she’s taking photos, too,” he said.

This isn’t the first large scale photography project in which Sheaffer has been involved. During a break from being a college student in the late 1940s, he helped a United Nations relief project in Germany, which had been ravaged during World War II. His job was to take photographs of the animals donated to the war-torn region.

While the livestock included goats, rabbits, bees and even fertilized eggs, most of the photographs were of dairy heifers and the families who had received them. The photos were sent to the people who donated the animals.

“That was another interesting experience,” he said.