WIMER, Ore.– When buying a property the last thing you’d expect to find are headstones. But one Jackson County woman found nearly a dozen.
The shocking discovery has turned into a journey to find the families of the names she’s uncovered. According to Lesley Wooton, the woman who uncovered the headstones, so far they’ve been able to contact one of the families. However, it’s been quite an effort to track down relatives.
Most of these people, it seems, passed away around World War II. But that doesn’t mean she’s giving up on finding the stories of who these people were.
“This is an amazing thing to happen as simple as it is,” said Wooton.
On a property out near Wimer, Wooton was in the midst of renovating her porch when she came across something peculiar.
“When I first pulled over the first one I took a picture and sent it to Facebook right away,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh my god. You guys look what I just found! What do I do? I’m freaking out.'”
What she found were eleven headstones of people dead nearly 80 years. Initially, there were concerns the house her family had just moved into during the summer was sitting on a gravesite.
“There’s not a bunch of dead bodies in my patio,” said Wooton, relieved. “We don’t have to smudge the ground or start praying.”
But with some help from the community, Wooton found out the headstones belonged to people buried at Siskiyou Memorial Park in Medford.
“It was kind of bizarre that somebody would end up with all of these stones from the same memorial park,” she said.
According to Perl Funeral Home, the headstones were temporary markers before the actual bronze headstones arrived. These concrete stones must have then been donated for someone to use.
While they may have been tossed aside, Wooton still believes they hold value.
“They mean something to somebody,” she said. “Maybe somebody way down in their bloodline wants to know who they were or who their family was and has no idea how to get a piece of tangible evidence of their family.”
It’s now become something of a mission for Wooton. With the help of a genealogist, Candy Kaiser, she’s starting to put together the lives of these people. With one family contacted, Kaiser is working on building the family trees of two others.
“I think with ancestry now and DNA so many people are interested in who their ancestors are so this is not a story that you come across very often,” said Kaiser. “So I think that’s intriguing.”
There’s still quite a journey ahead for Wooton and Kaiser. But as she learns more about them she’s discovering their stories are a reminder of our history and how these people lived.
“You know part of their life force is in these stones and finding next of kin means a lot to me personally,” said Wooton. “It’s what I would want somebody to do for me in the same situation.”
Wooton says she hopes to compile all eleven stories together into a book. According to the Josephine County Historical Society, who’s working with Wooton, they would be able to do that once all the information has been collected.
If you’d like to continue following this story and who the names are on the headstones, Wooton has created a Facebook group called “11 stones for home.“
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