Effort Underway To Mark, Find Confederate Gravesites

    Properly marking and identifying gravesites is a time-honored tradition. However, with passing years and patchy record availability, keeping everything just as it should be can get complicated. This week, the City of Umatilla is working to unwind questions around four buried veterans of the Confederacy after an effort was undertaken to mark the long-since buried men.
    The city operates two cemeteries in town. However, some of those buried in what are now city cemeteries predate the city’s legal founding in 1904. As such, early burial records can be spotty, and finding where someone was buried over 100 years ago can be less than obvious.
    Such was the case with certain veterans of the Confederate States of America. A search by the daughters of the Confederacy through Lake County indicated that five such veterans were buried in Umatilla, but where was unknown at the time. The federal government provided stones for the five, but only one site was known.
    “I had no record of the four,” said Misty Lambert, who helps oversee Umatilla’s city cemetery operations. Lambert who this week described Umatilla’s early cemetery records as a combination of ‘parchment paper’, ‘index cards’ and other less-than obvious records, said knowing where each person is can be a challenge, as in some cases stones marking graves may have been lost, or never put in place.
    “Sometimes, things get lost in translation.”
    On April 9, four stones representing the four men whose sites were unknown were placed in the Glendale Cemetery’s veterans area, not to denote their exact burial site, but to at least acknowledge the belief that they were buried somewhere in the cemetery.
    “When we couldn’t find any record of their burial, we decided that since we have a veteran’s section, we would honor those veterans,” Lambert said. “The VA was going to provide the headstones.”
    However, the markers might be able to move to the actual location, as area resident and cemetery supporter Taylor McCall this week said she knows where the other four people are located, and that the stones should be moved.
    “Three of those headstones belong at the Umatilla Annex and not in Glendale,” McCall said in a letter to the paper this week. “
    The city agrees that the markers would be better served at the actual gravesites, and Lambert on Monday said if McCall, or anyone else, can correctly identify where the markers should be, the city would like to hear from them so the markers can be moved.
    “We’d rather their stones be marked at their gravesite,” Lambert said.