Patti and Steve Erickson have been volunteering at the Western Heights Cemetery since September 2023, cleaning and photographing gravestones. On what seemed to be another regular day of volunteering and uncovering old gravestones, the pair made a discovery
Patti and Steve started photographing headstones last year and decided to survey in a regular pattern through the entire cemetery, with Patti photographing and Steve recording info in a notebook. Later, the pair went back to get additional photos in better lighting. They also spent quite a bit of time struggling to read the names of some of the older stones. Many were hand carved into a purchased headstone, or simply etched into a makeshift concrete marker. This is not surprising, as a large number of the burials occurred in 1900 to 1940.
Steve has since taken over management of a master spreadsheet to document people and information as they discover new markers.
Steve and Patti’s volunteering expanded over time. It went from taking a few photos, to photographing all the stones multiple times, compiling and managing the data records for the cemetery, and interpreting and recording headstone text.
They now have an even deeper connection to the cemetery.
“We had noticed several unusual graves there in the cemetery and unusual markers, and one of them is an area that is surrounded by a curbing … and if you look real close on the curbing, you see three names etched into the curb, and all of them have the last name Lindsey,” Steve said. “They were a little hard to notice at first because the curb would get overgrown by the grass.”
A couple months later, Patti found out she is related to this person and all of the several others there with the last name Lindsey. She’s lived in Oak Cliff for many years and never knew she had any relatives at Western Heights Cemetery.
“One of her Aunts had married someone with the last name of Lindsey,” Steve said. “We thought it’d be interesting if these kids were related to him. There was no relation there, but in tracing that — I started an ancestry tree for people in the cemetery — I put the Lindsey children in there and looked at some of the other trees.”
They ended up discovering that the three children are cousins to Patti. Patti and Steve recently purchased markers for the three Lindsey children who had “semi-unmarked” graves.
If this wasn’t an interesting enough discovery in itself, Steve also found that he had a very distant relative at the cemetery as well.
He was searching for information as to whether Sam Brewer, who is buried in the cemetery, was related to Theodore Brewer, who is the lynch-pin connecting three other burials in the cemetery. Searching again through ancestry trees, he found that Sam is his 6th cousin 3x removed.
“I did the same thing, and saw a name that looked familiar from my side of the family tree,” Steve said. “He’s over in the same area of the cemetery as the relatives of Patti’s. So you have a relative of Patti’s and a relative of mine.
“Most of her family on her dad’s side came over from Mississippi and Alabama, and all my relatives come down from South Dakota. We were definitely not expecting relatives to be in this little cemetery in Oak Cliff.”
