This story is part of a series highlighting seniors doing exceptional volunteer work in the community. The stories were part of a special print edition distributed throughout businesses in town.
Mardi Hammond is invested in keeping the town’s history alive.
Every Wednesday, she spends hours organizing files and helping to make information more accessible at the Eudora Community Museum.
Hammond has worked in museums in the past and has always enjoyed history and gathering information. Although she’s lived in Kansas most of her life, she didn’t have much knowledge of the area. Working in the museum has helped her learn more after moving to Eudora about a year and a half ago.
Hammond spends time filing and organizing obituaries that have been cut from newspapers or given to the museum. She also collects and makes photocopies from books sent to the museum. She files burial notices and other cemetery information. It can also take significant time to correct spelling and decipher some of the handwritten information, she said.
She also has been working on digitizing an architectural survey of businesses and residences in town, she said.
Hammond’s work in Eudora is important to her because she’s always been into her own family’s genealogy. Her interest in cemeteries came from her time spent living in Wichita where she researched pioneer families buried on the property. She occasionally takes dowsing rods to cemeteries to check the outer perimeters, since that’s where tombstones can tend to get lost.
When walking around a cemetery when she was younger, she met a man whose sister was buried in the cemetery as an infant but had no marker. It was something that always made her sad, so it’s important for her to carry on all the history she can.
She also helps clean up Bluejacket Park once a week, especially as it’s used more in the summertime.
Although she’s new to the area, she’s felt welcomed by the Senior Foundation of Eudora and has enjoyed meeting new people.
“Both my husband and I like to know about where we live. We have lived in several places, from over a million people cities to 2,000 cities populations, and we find that often people don’t know what’s in their own backyard or even how to get somewhere,” she said.