Links to the Past

The search for John Richardson leads here, to Sierra Madre, to a cemetery shaded by magnolia trees, to a grassy knoll covered with sunny yellow wildflowers.

His name is on the door, so to speak--on the cemetery’s black wrought-iron gate, on a plaque noting that “John Richardson, a Civil War veteran,” was the first to be buried here in 1884. But it’s not clear where.

Richardson is the great-great-great-grandfather of a 35-year-old Tacoma, Wash., woman named Holly Brandt Smith, and she has been looking for him.

On Smith’s behalf, at the 2 1/3-acre Sierra Madre Pioneer Cemetery, Covina resident Penny Dodd has picked up the trail. She is a grave hunter extraordinaire.

“I love cemeteries,” Dodd says. “I know it sounds weird, but I do.”

Lucky for family historians that she does.

Strangers like Smith will contact her and ask if she knows about their great-this or great-great-that. They figure she knows where the bodies are buried; she’s a volunteer for the nationwide Tombstone Project.

In 44 states, volunteers are transcribing tombstones and recording cemetery logs on the Tombstone Project’s Web site (https://www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery/). It is the first project of its kind, coordinators say. For family genealogists, the site can be the last stop on a long ancestral trail.

A new generation of online family researchers is tapping into the Internet’s exhaustive genealogical resources. The Web is taking people places that family genealogists used to get to by footwork. Online, for instance, you can find the West Boylston, Mass., census of 1870, and Jefferson County, Miss., wills from 1800 to 1833. First, though, you must plow through the ages via birth, census, death and other records before you can hope to find a generations-old burial plot.

So by the time you make it to the Tombstone Project’s Web site, it’s a heart-thumping wait while you scroll through the cemetery listings, the way Smith did two months ago.

She got there because of a Civil War fife.

Fife Is Link to Family Past

The fife was a Smith family heirloom.

Last Christmas, at her parents’ home in Northern California, Smith and her 84-year-old grandmother got to talking and looking through old family photos. The name of Holly Brandt Smith’s great-great-grandfather came up--James Monroe Smith.

The family knew he had fought with the 1st Michigan Cavalry and played a fife, or small flute.

Wait, Smith’s mother said one day, and dug the fife out of the safe deposit box.

That got Smith thinking.

Who was this man?

“So much information is lost when you don’t ask questions,” Smith says.

So she asked, and along the way she got sidetracked. Smith started out with a few scribbled notes that her aunt had made in the early 1970s. The family’s known history had gone back to 1872, when James Monroe Smith and his wife, Charlotte Richardson, got married in Los Angeles County.

At a local library, Smith decided to follow up on Charlotte’s parents, who also lived in the Los Angeles area. Her aunt had listed Charlotte’s father as “Lyman Richardson.” Los Angeles County’s 1860 census records had no listing for Lyman Richardson. But there was a John Richardson in Sierra Madre.

“Who’s this John guy?” Smith wondered.

Through other records--such as obituaries and death certificates--she found the correct names of Charlotte’s parents: John and Elizabeth “Betsy” Richardson.

Smith began logging on to her computer every day in search of family history, when she wasn’t running her handcrafts business from home. Even her 12-year-old son, Ryan, got caught up in the search and would ask after school: “Did you find anything good today, Mom?”

Usually the answer was yes.

And then Smith hit a wall.

On the Tombstone Web site, she found this listing at the Sierra Madre cemetery: “Richardson, John; interred 8-9-1884, Civil War veteran.”

Was this her great-great-great-grandfather? Could he have fought in the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, and still be in Los Angeles County in 1860? Would he have served in his early 50s?

Smith looked up the name of the volunteer who had recorded the cemetery’s tombstones: Penny Dodd.

“I never had hopes of finding my great-great-great-grandfather,” Smith wrote to Dodd in an e-mail. ‘But I may have???”

Researching E-Mail Requests

Every two weeks or so, Dodd, 61, gets a similar could-it-be e-mail, full of question marks and hope. Two years ago, for instance, a woman in Hawaii e-mailed a plea: The woman’s grandfather was buried somewhere in Glendora in a certain month and year. Could Dodd find him?

Dodd went to a local library, scrolled through old newspaper obituaries and found the man’s name. “Yahoo!” Dodd said, when she read where the man was buried.

She headed to the cemetery and took a picture of his tombstone so his granddaughter in Hawaii could see it.

A stranger would later help Dodd in much the same way.

Dodd’s own family tree search took her to Alabama last year to look for her great-great-grandfather’s grave. On a dirt road, she stopped to read a Louina historical marker, and a man in a pickup truck pulled over.

Can I help? he asked. She told him who she was looking for--a man who died in 1865. Oh, come on, he said, I’ll show you. And he did. The man was an unofficial town historian, and he knew exactly where her great-great-grandfather was buried.

The grave hunting is a solo hobby for Dodd, who is divorced and a retired cost-price analyst for Hughes Aircraft. She likes the detective work, and the tombstones turn her head.

A few years ago, Dodd read about an old cemetery that spun her into the path of the Tombstone Project. In Glendora, according to a local newspaper article, Fairmount Cemetery was in bad shape, with missing and crumbling tombstones on graves dating back to the 1870s. The story included a list of burials compiled by a member of the cemetery board.

Huh, Dodd thought. Too bad more people won’t see those names. Then she heard about the Tombstone Project.

A Virginia woman named Pam Reid started the project three years ago, after a search for her ancestors’ graves in South Carolina. Reid was appalled at the number of tombstones that were missing, vandalized or unreadable. You know, her husband said, with Memorial Day coming up, the cemeteries will be full of visitors. Why not see if they’ll write down the tombstones inscriptions, and then put them online?

The idea took off, and Reid approached the coordinator at a volunteer genealogical Web site with whom she had worked. He agreed to link the Tombstone Project to the noncommercial USGenWeb Project archives at no cost, and the work began. Volunteers turned in what they could, whenever they could. In her free time, Reid, a mother of three and Web page designer, formats the information--sometimes, volunteers turn in handwritten listings--and loads it onto the Web site.

With no way to confirm the listings, Reid puts all contributions on the Web site and warns users to try to independently verify the information.

In Carter County, Okla., a man sent the names of 37,000 burials that he had spent 30 years compiling by walking through cemeteries, studying records and reading obituaries. He updates the list once a year. One Tennessee couple have made it their life’s work to document every cemetery in their county of McMinn.

So far, volunteers have documented thousands of cemeteries in 44 states, with the permission of cemetery officials, who sometimes provide records. (No statistics are available on the number of cemeteries nationwide, but there are more than 1,200 in California, according to the Interment Assn. of California.)

In California, volunteers like Dodd have recorded all of the burials at more than 200 cemeteries.

Dodd will be driving along, spot an old cemetery and think: Ooooh. She will stop, get her cemetery kit from the trunk, and start writing. The kit includes a clipboard and supplies--such as a water bottle, gloves and trowel--to clean off unreadable tombstones,

One day Dodd stopped by the Sierra Madre cemetery. Nine months later, after walking from tombstone to tombstone, she submitted the names of the dead to the Tombstone Project.

That’s where Holly Brandt Smith saw the name of John Richardson.

Phone Call Provides Link

Holly Brandt Smith’s e-mail on her great-great-great-grandfather caught Dodd’s eye.

“I don’t know if the John Richardson you have listed (interred 8-9-1884) is him?” Smith wrote. “The dates as far as being a Civil War veteran don’t add up unless he served from California?”

On her behalf, Dodd called Phyllis Chapman, of the Sierra Madre Historical Preservation Society. John Richardson! Funny you should ask, Chapman told her.

For two years, Chapman had been in touch with an Oxnard woman named Diane Flynn, who had also been on a genealogical search. Diane Flynn is married to John K. Flynn--the great-grandnephew of John Richardson and a Ventura County supervisor.

Smith couldn’t believe her luck. Through Dodd, she was able to call her third cousin, twice removed, and speak with his wife, who had compiled a treasure trove of family history.

“I was elated,” Smith says. “Diane and I have really made a connection. We share a common obsession.”

Since that first call in February, Smith and Diane Flynn have talked by e-mail or phone almost every day and have exchanged copies of family records by mail. One of their sticking points: John Richardson and the Civil War.

Diane Flynn wrote to the National Archives and could not turn up Civil War records on John Richardson. She still isn’t sure whether he served.

But the National Archives does have the military records of James Monroe Smith. Holly Brandt Smith thinks that history got transposed somewhere along the way and that the war service of James Monroe Smith got attached to Richardson, his father-in-law. The distinction is not that important to her.

“He’s my ancestor, regardless,” she says.

(A spokesman for the Sierra Madre Pioneer Cemetery said officials have no immediate plans to correct the plaque that lists Richardson as a Civil War veteran. And a spokeswoman for the Sierra Madre Historical Preservation Society says the group will continue to research Richardson’s background and consider updating its brochure that mentions his Civil War service.)

Meanwhile, Sierra Madre historians say that Richardson’s tombstone no longer exists, that vandals made off with it years ago.

But that didn’t stop Penny Dodd.

One recent cloudy afternoon, she hunts for his grave at the quiet Sierra Madre cemetery, where squirrels scurry up the palm trees and gophers whisk up mounds of dirt.”Well, let’s see,” Dodd says, flipping to Richardson’s records on her clipboard. “He’s supposed to be in [spot] B-66.”

“Somewhere in between Miller and Peterson.”

The rows of graves are not clearly marked, but Dodd has an idea where the older ones are. She wanders a few minutes and then stops. Under an oak tree, there’s a 18-inch tall tombstone with the top third or so missing. On one side of the tombstone is the Miller grave; on the other is Peterson.

The inscription on the damaged tombstone is hard to read. Dodd stoops for a closer look.

The year of death says “1884,” and there’s a partial date--the number “9.”

She checks her list. Richardson was buried on Aug. 9, 1884.

“That’s John,” she says. “1884.”

One more piece of the puzzle.

“With each little bit of information I find,” says Smith, in Washington, “I feel like I’m forming a relationship I never knew, and I feel like I should know because they’re my ancestors.”

Next vacation, Smith, her husband and son plan to stop by Sierra Madre, a place that they never heard of until two months ago, to see the resting place of a man they now know.

“It’s a connection,” Smith says. “Just being where he was.”

*

Times staff writer Renee Tawa can be reached by e-mail at renee.tawa@latimes.com.

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FINDING FAMILY

They met in one of those odd cosmic collisions--a 65-year-old Ojai man, John Karen Flynn, and a 35-year-old Washington woman, Holly Brandt Smith. They are third cousins, twice removed; each had been independently researching the history of a distant ancestor, John Richardson, who died in 1884 in Sierra Madre.

The two recently hooked up, thanks to the efforts of a Covina volunteer for the nationwide Tombstone Project, which is recording tombstones in old cemeteries, such as Sierra Madre’s.

The Richardsons of Townsend, MA.

Levi Richardson, born: 1775, Townsend, MA.

Eunice Wesson: born: 1781, Townsend, MA.

John Richardson, born: 1811, Londonderry, Vt.

Elizabeth (Betsy) O’Brien, born: 1811, Ohio.

Holy Brandt Smith, born: 1963, Placerville, CA. John and Besty Richardson are her great-great-great grandparents.

Calista Richardson, born: 1823, Londonderry, VT.

Karin Flynn, born: 1823, Ireland.

Calista and Karin Flynn had five children. Their first child was William Karin Flynn, grandfather of John Karen Flynn, born, 1933, Ojai, Ca.

The Richardsons of Townsend, MA. Compiled by: Diane W. Flynn