Wisconsin Life

(piano music) -

Voiceover

Their stories told in stone. -

Frank

August 16th, 1906. So she's married, and she's dead in her 20s. (piano music) -

Voiceover

And pledges to remember. -

Frank

A dad and a daughter. The German phrase on the bottom, that's what I was, I don't know how you say that, but that's probably an indication that the parents at least came from Germany. -

Voiceover

Several days each week, for three years now, Frank Germanson has made his way to old cemeteries around Milwaukee. He walks the rows, takes in the quiet, and reads the stories. -

Frank

When I was first getting going, I don't remember the name, but there was a husband and wife, and they had 10 infants' gravestones around them. All their children that died at birth, and that has to be just terrible. I just can't imagine that. And I can feel how they felt, you know, it just sounds really strange, but it's almost like I go in there and look over their shoulder when they're grieving. -

Voiceover

But Frank doesn't come to mourn the dead. He comes to make a record for the living. At each grave, he stops, pulls out a camera, and captures a photo. (camera clicks) It's a practice Frank began three years ago when he started looking for his family's story on a genealogy website. -

Frank

When I retired, I started working on our ancestry tree. And I was working on it, and one time I got a hint on "Ancestry," and it was from "Find-A-Grave." -

Voiceover

Frank had discovered an online database of grave stones, valuable information for an amateur genealogist. -

Frank

I signed up to be a volunteer photographer. So, if someone from out-of-state wanted a picture somewhere around here, I would take it and put it online for them. Didn't last long, because I couldn't see any point of just looking for one in all these treasures. So what I have done since is I go and I take entire sections. -

Voiceover

Since then, he's spent a few days each week working his way through old cemeteries, photographing one section at a time. Those photos are adding up. Last count, I just rounded 17,000. And that's in three years. I've taken over 21,000 pictures. (mouse clicks) When he gets home, Frank uploads his latest photos to the "Find-A-Grave" database, where researchers and families around the world can find them, and the information they display. -

Frank

Their birth date. Their death date. Places. I had two sisters from Switzerland send me an email. And I posted a picture from Woodlawn Cemetery, and it just so happened that was their great-grandmother's sister that moved to Wisconsin at the end of the last century, 1800s, and they lost contact. So they thanked me profusely. -

Voiceover

As useful as Frank's work is, it's also becoming more urgent. The ethnic groups that built many of these cemeteries have long moved on. And nature is slowly wearing away the monuments themselves. -

Frank

Some of the stones are in really bad shape and my goal is to get them before they can't give any information. -

Voiceover

And while Frank gathers that information for the living, he's doing something else for those whose names are on these markers. It's something simple but rare. He remembers. -

Frank

Well, when you think of the United States and all the people that made it great, and these are just some little pebbles in the mosaic, and I don't want them to be forgotten. (piano and string music)