All about grave dowsing

A quest is to mark all unmarked graves; Genealogy meeting is set for Sept. 15

By Kimberly Burk, for Edmond Life and Leisure

Jan Beattie has great affection for her ancestors. Truth be told, she cares about your ancestors as well.

She wants to know where her forebearers are buried, and that their graves are well-cared-for. But especially, she wants everybody’s final resting place to be marked. Preferably with an enduring headstone.

“There are a lot of unmarked graves,” said Beattie, a retired infectious disease microbiologist and president of the Edmond Genealogical Society.

“I have a broken heart thinking about all of those thousands of people who died on the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe trail and never got a proper burial.”

Her search for her second-great-grandmother’s grave led Beattie about 25 years ago to the White River Valley Historical Society in Taney County, Mo., her mother’s ancestral home in the Ozark Mountains. And there in a tiny church cemetery near Forsyth she learned a skill that has solved some family mysteries and turned into a community service.

It’s called grave dowsing.

“It uses a technique similar to what the oldtimers used to call water witching, to find where to drill for a well,” Beattie said. “It gives you the ability to detect human remains.”

Beattie freely acknowledges that the practice has not been scientifically proven.

“No one knows why it works,” she says.

But when Beattie walks across what is believed to be a grave, holding two rods she has fashioned from metal coat hangers, the rods will cross if there’s a burial beneath the earth, she says.

Beattie will present a program about the practice during the Monday, Sept. 15, monthly meeting of the Edmond Genealogical Society. The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. at the Edmond Stake Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 15700 N. Pennsylvania Ave.

With most Christian burials, people are buried facing east, and Beattie walks across a suspected grave from east to west.

“You hold your rods loosely in your hands, your elbows at your side,” Beattie said.

“When you are over a grave, the rods should cross. When you step off a grave, they should uncross.”

Beattie said she has been invited to use the technique by people who buy a piece of property they think might contain an old family or community cemetery. She’s also been contacted by funeral homes and cemetery associations, especially in cases where cemetery records have been lost. When markers and records are lost, she said, cemeteries run the risk of disturbing a gravesite by digging in what they think might be an unused part of a cemetery.

Beattie said she feels confident she confirmed the final resting place of her second-great grandmother after those historical society members in Missouri taught her the technique. The grave had at one time been marked with a field stone but never a proper headstone. A grandson who came for a visit from Washington in the 1940s was dismayed to discover that the stone had been moved, and the cemetery records were thrown away by a daughter after the sextant died.

Edmond genealogist Ricia Allen says “finding our roots is important to us as a society because it is the framework of who we are. Our past tells a story of who we are.”

Allen said she was already familiar with the practice of water dowsing when she learned about grave dowsing from Beattie.

“Because I personally had problems locating a grave of my great, great, great-grandfather, I realized that this tool could be of use to others in the genealogy field,” Allen said.

Grave dowsing was used to identify about 80 unmarked graves in the Union Soldiers Cemetery near NE 36 and Martin Luther King Avenue in Oklahoma City. Wreaths Across America was already placing wreaths on the marked graves at Christmas time, Beattie said, and local genealogy groups now place Christmas wreaths on the unmarked graves.

Edmond genealogist Ricia Allen says ‘finding our roots is important to us as a society because it is the framework of who we are. ‘