Woman's quest: Identify 1,335 unmarked graves

MICHIGAMME TOWNSHIP (AP) — Who’s buried in hundreds of unmarked graves at an Upper Peninsula cemetery is a question that has challenged one genealogy enthusiast for 15 years.

About 1,335 people have been buried in unmarked graves at Lakeview Cemetery over the past century and a half, according to Renee Saari of Michigamme.

“Everyone deserves to be remembered,” she told The Mining Journal of Marquette.

And so, she went to work in 2000 to track down the names of those buried in the cemetery.

About a dozen members of the Michigamme Historical Society’s Lakeview Cemetery Committee have joined the project.

So far, they’ve used death certificates, obituaries and burial permits to identify about 300 people, and they know the grave sites of about 50.

The cemetery is in Marquette County’s Michigamme Township, about 35 miles west of Marquette in central upper Michigan.

Many of the people without a headstone died in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and likely couldn’t afford a marker, Saari said.