October 15, 2015

By Seth Freed Wessler

On a spring morning a few years ago in St. Louis, Missouri, Etta Daniels, a spry 72-year-old with oval wire-frame glasses, was in the northeast corner of Greenwood Cemetery, where she often came on Saturdays, searching for gravestones “before they disappear.” She’d already spent more than a decade helping families locate and honor their loved ones buried in Greenwood. That day, she was joined by 69-year-old Barbara Harris, who is “not usually one to go to the woods.” Wearing gardening gloves and long sleeves to keep off the poison ivy and bugs, Harris was hoping that, with Daniels’s help, she could find her great-grandmother’s grave.

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