Santa Rosa graveyard expert knows where the bodies are buried, at least many of them

Jeremy Nichols can tell you where the bodies are buried - at least most of them - and how they came to be there.

His passion for cemeteries, which started with a mystery about why one of his relatives was buried in Healdsburg's Oak Mound Cemetery, led him to become an authority on Sonoma County's burial spots, spawned a couple of books and got him appointed president of the Sonoma County Historical Society.

He has chronicled and visited more than 130 graveyards that span Sonoma County, from the oldest at Fort Ross on the coast - probably dating to around 1812 with the creation of the Russian colony - to others that have been literally paved over, such as the 89 graves that make up the Pythian Home Cemetery in the Valley of the Moon.

He has braved poison oak, wasps and bees, and occasional unwelcoming property owners to locate the resting place of the county's earliest settlers, as well as to clean up badly overgrown cemeteries and fix vandalized monuments.

His books pinpoint near-vanished cemeteries like the one at Pine Flat, the 19th Century boom-to-bust mining town in the Mayacamas Mountains northeast of Healdsburg. Recurrent fires wiped out the wooden grave markers that identified the final resting places of those who died from accidents, disease or violence in one of the saloons.

For Nichols, each cemetery is like a history book and each person buried there has a chapter, however brief.

“I find it fascinating that all of these people have stories, and some are actually very interesting stories - places they've lived in, places they have visited, done business with, or what have you,” said Nichols, who studies old newspaper archives, census data, death certificates and even criminal records and coroner's inquests to fill in the blanks of their lives.

Many of the old, small cemeteries that dot the county are populated with those who came west for the Gold Rush, but ended up as farmers.

“This county was built by failed gold miners,” Nichols said as he paused during a recent group volunteer clean-up at Spring Hill Cemetery, just west of Sebastopol.

The cemetery, along with land donated for a church and school, was established by James McReynolds, who was listed as a gold hunter in early census records. He went back East and returned with his wife, Elizabeth Patience McReynolds, who crossed the plains with him only to die in 1853, at age 22. She was probably the first burial in the cemetery.

Chain of title

With support from the county parks department, Nichols and other volunteers have for years been helping to care for Spring Hill cemetery, which the county took possession of when there was a break in the chain of title and nobody ended up owning it.

A decade ago, it was overgrown, with half to two-thirds of the grave markers toppled.

“You couldn't even see it was a cemetery,” said Sue Zeni, whose great-great-great grandfather, Jacob McReynolds, is buried there.

“People used to trash this place. It was party central with teenagers,” she said of the alcohol bottles, condoms and bonfire evidence.

Some gravestones ended up as fireplace back-pieces, in antique stores or on someone's patio as a Halloween prop.

But a number were located and returned to their rightful place.

The partying and vandalism stopped after volunteers began clearing brush, gluing tombstones back together and putting up new wooden markers. “It's clear to anybody who looks that someone is caring for this place and they don't trash it anymore,” Nichols said.

Nichols' prodigious energy has also gone into uncovering information on the forgotten people buried in paupers' graves at the old Chanate Cemetery. It was connected to the county hospital and also was known as the County Hospital Cemetery, County Farm Cemetery and County Cemetery.

In the days of unknown contagious “plagues” many who succumbed were buried there with little or no ceremony. It also served as a resting place for the local Chinese who were not allowed to be buried in the “town cemetery,” or the Rural or Oddfellows cemeteries.

More than a dozen years ago, he urged county officials to clean up the huge weed patch that covered the 1,500 graves, which led to ongoing volunteer efforts to spruce up the potter's field, as well as find out more about the deceased whose graves were marked only by numbered tin cans filled with concrete.

It also led to a 2009 book by Nichols, “History of the Old Sonoma County Cemetery, Plus a Biographical Record of Burials, 1881-1944.”

“He looks under every rock to get as much as he can. Without this work, there's people sort of lost to us,” said Katherine Rinehart, manager of the Sonoma County Library's History & Genealogy branch. “He spends a lot of time doing research. He is very focused.”

Under-reported

She noted that Nichols is particularly interested in looking out for the underdog and under-reported deaths.

“It's important to get those stories out there,” she said, and the only way to do it is through researching primary sources like the back pages of old newspapers or government records.

“It takes a special talent,” Rinehart said.

Nichols, 69, a retired Silicon Valley manufacturing engineer with a degree in physics, moved to Sonoma County two decades ago and seems an unlikely candidate to become so entranced by cemeteries and the lives of those who repose there.

He acknowledges a certain bit of obsessive compulsiveness. When he was working for electronic companies, his hobby was sorting screws into little drawers. Now, he finds it more interesting to sort people and stories.

“I scratch the itch by organizing history,” he said.

His sleuthing might involve looking at why Charles Brewster, an apparent pauper buried in the potter's field in 1891, had a headstone costing the princely sum of $100. (It likely was paid for by a wealthier brother in Santa Cruz).

Or who was the John Doe, the neatly-dressed “tourist” who died suddenly on July 6, 1936, inside the Railroad Square depot? He dropped dead “after inquiring when the next train would leave for Geyserville,” is the only thing newspaper files revealed about him. His identity apparently was never established.

Ancestors' graves

Nichols enjoys being able to help people locate their ancestors' graves, fill in their family trees and answer their questions.

“People e-mail me, expecting me to know everything about Sonoma County,” he said. “I may not know everything about cemeteries, but I know people who do. I'm a facilitator.”

Some people may not be particularly interested in the past, or the lives of previous generations. But Nichols said that if you don't study history, “you don't ever understand why the city is laid out the way it is, why roads are named the way they are. It's mysteries like these that interest me.”

After further pondering the question, he says, “Why do I like history? It's all the stuff I've missed. It turns out there is something in my psyche that doesn't want to miss anything. I get up in the morning because I might miss something if I don't.”

Nichols' interests are many. He is also head of the Sonoma County Bird Rescue Center, and he volunteers as a weekend docent at Bodega Head during the gray whale migration season, providing information to those who are curious about the procession of leviathans making their annual round-trip from Mexico to Alaska.

He met his wife of 40 years, Laura Cline, when they both worked at Hewlett-Packard in Santa Clara.

They don't have children and shared a love of motorcycle touring for more than 30 years, riding a pair of BMWs. But she's not particularly interested in history, or cemeteries.

Nichols' interest was stoked about 20 years ago when he began to look into why an uncle who had lived in Colusa was buried in Oak Mound Cemetery in Healdsburg.

Nichols discovered that his uncle, George Brown, died in 1958 and was buried next to an older brother, James Brown, who died in 1925.

“I had no idea this older brother was even out in California,” he said.

After doing more research, he discovered some in-laws are buried in a small cemetery in Geyserville, on a little hill in the middle of a vineyard.

But he wondered why there wasn't a guidebook to Sonoma County cemeteries. A librarian suggested he write one.

“How hard can it be? There are only 30 cemeteries in the county,” he thought.

It turned out there are more than four times as many even though some might only have a few graves. “So much for the pamphlet I was going to knock off in six months,” he said.

Two years later, he produced the 134-page “Cemeteries of Sonoma County California, a History and Guide” to tell their stories and enable genealogists, historians and other researchers to locate them.

In visiting every cemetery, he has found pioneer graves that were overlooked in extensive surveys done in the 1920s and 1930s by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

But it was his determination to clean up the county cemetery and create a data base and plaques for those buried there that led to his becoming president of the Historical Society, as well as a board member of the Sonoma County Genealogical Society.

Rather than try to raise money on his own to fix up the county cemetery, he approached the Sonoma County Historical Society to see if he could operate under their umbrella.

“They elected me to the board,” he said. A few years later, he was made president of the organization.

New energy

Gaye LeBaron, Press Democrat columnist and historian, said Nichols' tireless work on long neglected cemeteries “has brought a lot of new energy to projects in several areas, including the Historical Society and the History Museum.”

As far as deep questions about life and death that might be prompted by hanging out in graveyards, Nichols responded with, “Everybody dies, except maybe you and me. We keep telling ourselves that until it's too late.”

His mission is to discover something about lives that have never been studied and find interesting biographical detail. And he hopes he can inspire others to fix up their old cemeteries.

Nichols said the emphasis on cremations in modern burials may lead to something being lost if there are fewer headstones and monuments, something society may regret in a generation or two.

For all of his interest in cemeteries, Nichols isn't sure where he wants to be buried. His frugal Scottish side makes him shy away from the expense of a formal funeral or burial, and he ponders cremation:

“Would I like to have my ashes scattered at sea from a B-17, or at a state park I like so much, or have a monument at potter's field, because I spent so much time working on it? I don't know. I haven't come to a decision.”

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@clarkmas.