Two Traverse City residents are dedicating their retirements to cemeteries.
Scott Schwander and Jack Franke have spent years cleaning and digitizing the gravestones of Oakwood Cemetery, memorizing every plot and familiarizing themselves with the stories of the deceased.
Schwander retired from the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Department 10 years ago. Since then, he has been devoted to the preservation of historic gravestones in the Traverse City area.
Schwander’s great-great-grandfather was a sharpshooter in the First Michigan Sharp Shooters regiment, a Union, primarily Native American, company of the Civil War.
His connection to his grandfather led him to volunteer at Oakwood Cemetery, cleaning the gravestones of Civil War veterans.
Schwander said he eventually became more involved with the work, updating the cemetery maps and ordering headstones for unmarked graves.
When he ran out of Civil War veteran gravestones to clean, he moved onto others.
“I kept going with more service members because I just didn’t feel comfortable walking by another veteran of, say, World War I, World War II, Korea or Vietnam,” Schwander said. “Because they all became, you know, heroes in my eyes.”
Now, Schwander said he cleans a wide array of historical headstones, though veterans’ markers will always be his first priority.
First, Schwander said that no one else will do it. Though he knows a few volunteer headstone cleaners in the Grand Traverse area, he said that he is the only one in Oakwood Cemetery.
He views the act as an obligation to the deceased and their families, citing that "history belongs to everybody."
"Those men could have been buried in Arlington National Cemetery or Great Lakes National Cemetery,” he said. “But they chose Oakwood. So Oakwood is their Arlington.”
Schwander also said that he is a boarding school survivor from Holy Childhood Indian boarding school in Harbor Springs and had a son convicted of murder.
“If you combine that with 25 years of police work, you’re going to come up with four little letters called PTSD,” Schwander said. “This is my treatment plan that does not come out of a prescription bottle.”
Schwander took his time cleaning the headstone of a 9-year-old boy who died in the 1890s.
He rinsed the stone with a hose, scrubbed Orvus cleaning paste into every crevice, rinsed again and coated the stone with D2 Biological solution, the same cleaner used in national cemeteries.
Schwander said that each headstone usually requires multiple cleanings to restore them to their original color. He then returns every two to three years to repeat the process.
Schwander will occasionally take before and after photos of his work, sharing them with gravestone digitizers from Find a Grave, a virtual cemetery and subsidiary of the Ancestry.com website.
Over 250 million gravestones have been entered into Find a Grave’s digital cemetery since 1995, making it the world’s largest gravesite collection.
Franke has been a member of Find a Grave for 18 years and an active contributor for nine. He has uploaded more than 13,000 photos to the site, including the details of more than 8,000 gravestones.
Like Schwander, Franke was introduced to the “cemetery business” through a family connection.
While tracing back his family tree, Franke discovered that his great grandfather was buried in an unmarked grave.
He told his cousin, who had been leaving flowers at the same cemetery their grandfather was buried in on Memorial Day for years.
"She said, 'My God, I've been walking on him all these years'," Frankie said.
Since then, he has been digitizing family trees through Find a Grave.
“You get hooked on it. It’s like an addiction,” he said.
Claiming to be retired for as long as he was employed, Franke has digitized the entirety of the Oakwood Cemetery and has the history of many plots committed to memory.
He carries a binder full of maps and historical records through the property, pointing out large plots of unmarked graves from decades past.
“Here’s Gale, his dad, the mom, the mom’s mom, a daughter to the father…,” Franke said, gesturing to a single headstone. “And then over in the back corner is a son. And there’s one marker for all.”
He utilizes many resources in his digitization process, including Ancestry.com, local genealogy spreadsheets and the Grand Traverse County death and marriage records. He credits his success, however, to the Oakwood Cemetery office.
"Very, very nice people are in this cemetery office," Franke said. "Very nice. I probably wouldn't be doing (this) if it wasn't that way."
As he drove leisurely through the winding cemetery, he recalled a story of a woman who reached out to him to find the burial plot of her 5-year-old relative who died in 1906.
Franke said that he searched the cemetery where the young girl was buried and found the snow just barely melted off the top of her headstone.
"I said, 'I finally put my hand on little Adeline's grave'," he said. "And she emailed me back and she says, 'I (just) cried for two hours.' "
"I feel very fortunate that I can do things for people," he said. "I'm having fun doing this and people appreciate it, and they let you know."
This story was produced by the Michigan News Group Internship Program, a collaboration between WCMU Public Media and local newspapers in central and northern Michigan. The program’s mission is to train the next generation of journalists and combat the rise of rural news deserts.
