Darkan local Lani Munday set herself the task several years ago to identify the unmarked graves of the Darkan Cemetery.
Unmarked graves are graves where a marker, headstone, or nameplate is not there to indicate a body is buried there.
In 2014, Mrs Munday took her two grandchildren to the cemetery to show them the graves of their grandfather Steddy and his great uncle.
“The Steddy family have been in the district for many years and while we were there I said to them to be careful because you might be stepping over somebody’s grave that’s not marked,” she said.
“I said to them give me twelve months and I will find out who is in all these unmarked graves and we will put a mark around them. It took a lot longer than twelve months.”
The entire process ended up taking Mrs Munday four years to find who the 16 grave-sites belonged to so they could be marked and recognised.
She said researching her family history for 20 years previously helped her with the project.
“First of all I went to the shire and looked at the burial index and I had found out that maybe it wasn’t quite accurate when it started in 1915, from that time things had been taken from one book and put into another book and numbers had got mixed up in the first few years,” she said.
“I mainly found the names of most people, then I asked a local historian called Val Crowley if she knew any of these people and found out a lot of the names that way. I also did a lot of research on Trove through the newspaper section just looking for names. I tried everywhere that I could think of.”
She had success finding who most of the 16 unmarked graves belonged to but still struggled with four. The unmarked graves of an unknown child, Davey Baby, H Slater and Sidney Trickett.
She eventually found information on Davey Baby, H Slater and Sidney Trickett but still to this day has come to a halt on any information regarding the unmarked grave of the unknown baby.