“Graveyard Granny” published 450 page guide to Lakeview Cemetery

Folks with ties to Johnston City owe a tip of the hat to Helen Lind, an 85 year old city resident who spent more than seven years collecting and publishing publicly available facts about individuals buried in Lakeview Cemetery. Located east of Arrowhead Lake, Lakeview is the city’s largest cemetery with approximately 6,000 graves.

Lind, who has cataloged 200 graveyards, started working on Lakeview in 2003. She walked the entire cemetery three different times, recording the location of each gravestone and the information chiseled on them. “We call it reading the cemetery,” she explained. “After the first reading, I walked it again to make sure we hadn’t missed anyone. We had missed a couple.”

Next, she visited courthouses and libraries for additional fact about each person buried in Lakeview. Lind said of the process, “We would go to the courthouse and we would look up death records. Those would tell us the parent’s names of the deceased. Then we’d look up marriage records and we’d add that to the record. Lind also combed newspapers and funeral home records for facts about the deceased. “Then I put the gathered facts in the computer and then I walked it again to make sure it was correct,” she added.

Lind published her Lakeview Cemetery findings in a 450 page, comb bound catalog now kept at the Johnston City Public Library.

Lind said of her cemetery catalogs, “It really helps people away from here more than anybody. We have a lot of people who come through our museum in Marion who are looking for anything they can find about an ancestor. I’ve had people tell me, “You told me something about my ancestor I didn’t know.”

My grandchildren call me “Graveyard Granny,” Lind mused. She traces her fascination with graves to her childhood when she visited her grandmother’s grave in Missouri. “I found a grave that had the name Sutt on it,” she said. “That was my maiden name, and I thought, “That’s kin to me!”

Lind serves on the board of directors of the Williamson County Historical Society Museum and Library and is editor of the society’s quarterly newsletter. This organization houses all of her cemetery catalogs in its library.

Lind is also a charter member of the Franklin Area Historical Society Museum and Genealogical Library in West Frankfort.

(The book was actually published in 2003 and was a cooperative project between Helen Lind and Charla Schroeder Murphy so the credit for the book was long overdue. This article was published in a Johnston City newspaper in November 2024 by Tim Hastings. Transcribed by Sam Lattuca on 11/8/2024)