Middle school students at Glen Lake Community Schools have been on the hunt, researching residents of the long lost and found Glen Arbor Historic Cemetery.
“I see the students getting excited about history and realizing it’s all around them,” said Melissa Okerlund, Glen Lake middle school social studies teacher.
Glen Lake eighth grade social studies students are in the midst of a local history research project and reconstruction of lost records for the cemetery that was in operation from 1880 to 1927.
Only 13 headstones are personalized at the cemetery, but since ground penetrating radar work was done last summer, more than 88 graves were found. This led to local students helping uncover who resides in the once lost cemetery. Students are using documents including death certificates, obituaries, census data, news clippings to craft biographies of community members.
“We’re learning more about the kinds of records that are kept in the county clerk office, probate records. Its been fascinating to see copies that have been saved since 1901,” Okerlund said.
Okerlund is in the fifth year of teaching the research project. Each student has an essential question and person to explore that they describe in a research project.
Lily Shimunek is among them. Shimunek found through her research that many of the residents of the cemetery fought in various wars. There are four known civil war veterans laid to rest there.
There’s also plenty of mystery in the cemetery as Shimunek says there were a lot of unsolved murders in those days.
“Two brothers had died and then one went missing and they never found him,” Shimunek said.
Shimunek was researching Bur Parker, son of Civil War veteran Daniel Parker. A skill Shimunek learned was finding reliable resources to dig deeper.
“We had to go off the birth certificate because the day or the age of death was different on other documents than their actual death certificate,” Shimunek said.
Glen Lake students had help from two Glen Arbor historians that provided maps and documents as another resource.
Alayna Ottenbacher researched Glen Burgess, who’s older brother shot him in an accident, allegedly.
The research was hard and required digging including studying Burgess’ siblings.
“One of his siblings wasn’t listed on one of the websites, so I had to dig into the census and find where his parents were from and that kind of thing,” Ottenbacher said.
There were certain people that the students couldn’t research because of their common popularity. Another story that Shimunek and Ottenbacher found interesting was a person in the cemetery died from an overdose from a pharmacy prescription.
Lilly Hayes’ essential question was exploring how and why immigrants of the 19th century moved from Europe and to Leelanau County.
“It was cool to see the growth of immigration coming from Europe. We found out that in the 1830s there were a lot of push factors. They were pushed away from their homes from rising taxes and crop failures (The Great Potato Famine) ... They wanted to go there for better lives for the new generations ... I feel like it’s really important to learn about people who lived during that time and what they went through and what shaped our world today and how we all live,” Hayes said.
Janai Misner’s question was learning about the average lifespan of people during the 1800s and the differences from today. The advances in healthcare particularly impressed Misner.
“It’s really interesting, our advance in healthcare and how our average lifespans have increased,” Misner said. “Since that cemetery was forgotten, nobody knew about it after that storm. I live two houses away from the cemetery and I didn’t know it was there. I think it’s really important to remember and honor their lives by researching them.”
Emma Bosscher is researching Elmer Moore, a 7-year-old, who accidentally drowned in one of the nearby lakes. Moore attended school in Glen Arbor before he passed.
“What we thought was really interesting was he had siblings who all had different last names and two of them had the same name,” Bosscher said. “There were limited resources to try to find what happened, or didn’t have stories about their lives, so you had to figure out more about their parents or a distant cousin and whatever they had to say.”
Eden Noonan is researching Elizabeth Daniels, who was the wife of Samuel Daniels of Port Oneida. Elizabeth exemplified the life of a housewife taking care of her children and home in the 1800s.
The deep dive of research led Noonan scrolling through census data and death records.
“Some of them didn’t even have death records that we couldn’t find,” Noonan said.
Owen Pierce was busy hitting the books about Ireland native James Daly.
Daly settled in Glen Arbor where he passed away at 59-years-old. Daly was a Glen Arbor Township supervisor, farmer and carpenter.
“We had some previous files from people that did research on him before us, but then we also were given a source called Ancestry Classroom to look up and it has files on everything,” Daly said.
Pierce acknowledges Daly as an honest, hardworking man. He made the transition from Ireland to America after the Great Potato Famine.
“He left everything behind to come here. I think that was a brave decision on his part,” Pierce said. “ It’s always good just to have a skill (researching). Even if you find something, you can always dig deeper to find the really good stuff. You shouldn’t just settle for the set amount. You should go above and beyond to look for the other stuff that will really help you during a project like this. .”
Students have the chance to go to the cemetery Friday during a Memorial Day service.
