Tombstone Tuesday | Peter and Maria Michels

The Holy Cross Cemetery, in Mt. Calvary, Fond du Lac Co., Wisconsin, contains many family graves on my mom’s side. We had information that my third great grandparents, Peter and Maria Elizabeth (Koenigs) Michels were buried there.

In the summer of 2007, we visited the cemetery in hopes of finding their graves. We walked the entire cemetery and couldn’t find them. We decided to try to find the location of the cemetery records to both confirm they were buried there and to locate them. After several phone calls, we came into contact with a nun at Holy Cross Church. We met her at the church office and were told that “the graves are located in the lower right corner (northwest) of the cemetery, near the bottom of the hill. The stones are laying flat on the ground and face east/west.  They are approximately 4 rows up from the bottom and 10 graves over from the right side (west)”.

We found where the directions led us, but didn’t see any stones. We had luckily brought a small trowel with us and began pushing it into the ground where we thought the stones should be. After several tries, we struck one of the stones. Both were buried under about an inch and a half of dirt and grass.

Both Peter and Maria were born in Germany. Peter’s first with died in 1835, and he and Maria married in about 1840. They came to America probably in the 1950’s.