Published: March 23, 2007 11:02 pm      

PROFILE: Digging through the past

Pete Ames and the Friends of Local History are working to centralize records of thousands buried in Oakwood Cemetery

Pete Ames is fascinated by the stories of people buried Oakwood Cemetery on Portage Road.

There is Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901. Peter Porter was buried there, as well as dozens of local veterans from almost every war or conflict since the Revolutionary War.

“There are so many people in there and it covers such a wide range of time,” Ames said. “It’s just got a ton of history.”

Ames, a member of the Friends of Local History, is heading a project to organize and centralize records that detail who is buried in the cemetery and where their burial plots are located.

Ames’ work is part of a wider effort by local volunteers to catalogue information about local cemeteries at the Niagara Falls Public Library. They hope the information will make it easier for genealogists and researchers to find where people are buried in Niagara Falls and give them the information to look up death certificates or obituaries.

“They’re a gold mine of information,” Ames said of the death notices. “They seem to be everybody’s last shot at glory.”

Ames relishes the methodical work of compiling the long lists of plots dating back to the cemetery’s first burial in 1799, more than 50 years before the cemetery was officially incorporated. A warehouse supervisor by trade, Ames, 54, was drawn to genealogy five years ago after his father traced back his family history to England in the 1400s. For Ames, rolling through microfilm and digging through public records is thrilling. He now does research for others and charges a small fee to cover his expenses.

But it is the rich history of Oakwood that has captivated his attention after he learned the stories of just a few of the thousands of people buried in the Portage Road cemetery.

“It’s something local that we have there right in the heart of the city,” Ames said. “It’s just the potential stories of these individuals and so many different stories from different backgrounds.”

He would also like to see the cemetery added to the National Registry of Historic Places.

Larry Steele, president of Friends of Local History, and Dolores Marino, who heads the library’s Board of Trustees, are also working to reproduce the cemetery records.

Ames and another researcher, Pete Sinclair, are gathering obituaries about the war veterans buried in Oakwood and hope to include a catalogue of veterans in their work.

The cemetery — which lists more than 19,000 people buried there in records that date back to the mid-1800s — has names of many of the city’s most prominent residents, said Linnea Barto, an Oakwood clerk.