Westmoreland County cemetery working to discover, identify dozens of unmarked graves

NORTH HUNTINGDON, Pa. (KDKA) -- Just underground voids or something more? This is the question one Westmoreland County cemetery has been working to answer over the past several months. 

This all began more than a year ago when volunteers at Old Brush Creek Cemetery started a series of restorations, starting with landscaping work, then preserving damaged headstones and now discovering and identifying dozens of unmarked graves.

The cemetery in North Huntingdon has been around since the 1700s and was the cemetery of an old Presbyterian church.

But over time, the cemetery had become overgrown, headstones weathered and graves neglected.

"We have veterans buried here from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Spanish American War," Sue Kochman, the secretary of Friends of Old Brush Creek Cemetery told KDKA-TV. "It's definitely a slice of North Huntingdon history. Some of the people buried here were original settlers to this area."

These are all things that volunteers who wanted to give the place new life have been unearthing over the past year as they work to preserve not only the 337 known graves but the untold history buried feet beneath the ground.

"We'll go home, look that person up on ancestry. Usually we'll find them on census records and then we can determine who their family members were," said Kochman.

During the restoration, 65 lost graves have been discovered using a machine that looks like a lawn mower and can detect voids in the ground. It belongs to Columbia Gas and is more commonly used to find gas lines.

"They volunteered to ground penetrate radar scan the cemetery and do a GPS map of all the graves in here," said Bill Bray, the president of Friends of Old Brush Creek Cemetery.

There still needs to be one final scan of the cemetery to determine whether anyone else is buried here.

Then the cemetery will begin work to raise $5,000 to place small stone markers at the newly found graves. For the graves that are identifiable, the cemetery has been contacting family members to let them know their loved ones are resting there.