Jun 05, 2003 - 22:40:34 CDT
When Jim Ferder retired he didn't become the type who fishes or golfs or even the type who wanders around the house bored.Instead Ferder, 60, began spending endless hours during the warm summer months poring over the gravestones in Mandan Union Cemetery.
It wasn't a fascination with death that kept Ferder coming back to the cemetery; it was a fascination with genealogy and computers that prompted him to spend two years mapping Mandan Union Cemetery.
Ferder, a retired railroad worker from Mandan, decided to map the cemetery while doing genealogical work researching his family tree.
"In my genealogy work I've looked up many cemeteries on the Internet, and I thought it would be nice to have Mandan on there," Ferder said.
In April 2001 Ferder began the two-year project of mapping the cemetery and compiling a database of who was buried in the graves and where they were located.
"I went to the Internet and read up on how you're supposed to record a cemetery," Ferder said. "I had no idea."
Each day during the summer months Ferder would go out to the cemetery and study the grave markers. He spent an average of 40 hours per week writing down the inscription, type of gravestone and where it was located. Ferder then entered the information into his computer, which was slow work because he is blind in one eye and uses only two fingers for typing.
The cemetery is divided into three areas: the original north and south sides, formerly the Catholic and Protestant sections respectively, and the south side addition. The cemetery is further divided into 12 blocks, each block containing an average of 100 lots, each lot containing 12 graves. Ferder mapped approximately 12,000 graves.
"It's so large, and there are so many headstones, and, wow, it's beautiful," Ferder said. "It's really well maintained."
While Ferder was working in the cemetery during the summer, he said people would come up and ask him if he worked in the cemetery. When Ferder explained what he was doing, people asked if he knew where their relatives might be buried. He had no idea.
"They just wander around out there. They can't find anybody," Ferder said.
When the weather turned cold, Ferder left the cemetery behind for the season and spent the winter months in the auditor's office poring over birth, death and marriage certificates to compare and correct his notes. When gravestones in the cemetery only listed the month and year of a birth or death date, Ferder would try to find the exact date in the auditor's records. Through all of that work, Ferder found some interesting surprises.
"My great-grandfather is buried out there, and I've lived out there my entire life, and I never knew where he was. Now I do," Ferder said.
By December 2002, when Ferder finished mapping every grave in the cemetery and double checked his information, he had 347 pages of research. The next step of the project was to get all of the information online.
With the help of the Germans from Russia Historical Society and a few faculty from Virginia Tech, the database appeared online two weeks ago and is one of the largest cemeteries mapped on the Internet.
Ferder gave a copy of his database to the City of Mandan and is donating his computer with the database to the cemetery so people can have access to it at the caretaker's building. Ferder plans to get a map of the cemetery framed and place it in the caretaker's building with the computer soon.
Ferder is done with the project now, preferring to continue to map his and his wife's genealogies. He dedicated the database to his ancestors, the Germans from Russia. Ferder, who loves computers and plays computer games with his grandkids, has so far traced his bloodline back to the 1700s using genealogy programs. He said records are getting scarce, so he's learning some German so that he can study microfilms of German church records.
Ferder had hoped the database could be continually updated from the auditor's office as they receive death certificates.
"I wanted this thing to continue, not be dead all of the sudden," Ferder said.
However, there were concerns someone would attempt to hack into the auditor's system using the cemetery computer if it were networked. As of now the database contains no new graves after December 2002, but Ferder is hopeful it will somehow be continued.
"Some nut like me might come along some day," Ferder said with a chuckle.
(Reach reporter Cathryn Sprynczynatyk at 355-8809)
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