Editor’s Note: This is the the first story in a series of articles part of a special print edition highlighting senior citizens in the community. Visit local businesses to pick up your copy or reach out to [email protected].

Barb Seiwald is deeply invested in seeing the Catholic church’s cemetery preserved and studied for future generations.

Seiwald has always been deeply fascinated with caring for history and understanding both her own ancestry and that of other Eudora families. Her family has deep ties in Eudora, and her passion began after researching her own family. When she began looking into the Holy Family Cemetery and reading old records, many of which were in German, she began to understand how important the work was. By now, she knows the story of pretty much every person buried there. About 40 years ago, the cemetery needed a lot of love.

Headstones needed repairs and plants and timber were overgrown, she said. Four decades later, she’s still making sure the cemetery is kept up. She still goes to the cemetery to weed, pick up trash and tend to flowers. Maintenance started with rehabbing the old rock fence that was created by settlers and using the rock to create a new iron gate on the south side of the cemetery. She and a committee from the church also helped create a new fence and place a Holy Family statue.

Seiwald has helped repair and restore headstones, plant new trees and maintain the cemetery, but her work didn’t stop there. When she realized she couldn’t read many of the headstones – many of which date back to the first Eudora settlers – she got the old paper records showing names of over 800 people buried there. It’s important work because everyone deserves to be honored in a nice grave, she said. She’s now been researching for 40 years.

“The cemetery is something that everybody uses at some point in their lives,” she said.

When she isn’t cooking or baking for family or members of the community, she’s still working to digitize cemetery records. Eventually she hopes that anyone working to find out about their own ancestry can use the digitized information to track their family members who originated in Eudora. She’s going to have the digitized information placed into a virtual cemetery that will show photos of the grave, headstone, obituary, known history of the person and when they died.

She’s already taken photos of every grave and headstone, diagrams and plats so the database can accurately show each gravesite. She’s especially connected to the Holy Family Cemetery because of her family buried there, but she’s also passionate about keeping all history alive.

“I have grandparents down there and great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents down there. So between my husband and I, we have a lot of family down there, and I think that’s one reason that you stay connected to the cemetery,” she said.

It’s a quiet and comforting place for her, she said. She can read about other’s lives and help preserve important history.