For a dozen or so University of Colorado history students, Monday’s field trip was part “CSI” – the C is for Cemetery – and part Dewey Decimal System, a chance for a little hands-on history.
The assignment: Choose a name from professor Ellen Lawson’s list of African-Americans, all born before the Civil War and buried at historic Riverside Cemetery just north of Denver. Then use the cemetery’s records files to learn as much as possible about that individual.
That meant looking up the interment card, an old-fashioned index card listing name, age, gender, race and burial information, then finding the gravesite.
The project also required a reverse search, starting at the grave. Students chose a headstone, copied what information they could – some tombstones have weathered into illegibility – and returned to the cemetery office to look up the interment card and other details.
It sounded simpler than it proved.
History major Hoai-Hung Vo expected to find a woman’s tombstone, because the interment card identified Gibbie Burrell as a female.
“Uncle Gibbie,” read the tombstone. It called Burrell “an honest man and a true Christian.”
The question of Gibbie Burrell’s gender will, Lawson hopes, prompt Vo into pursuing other resources.
Among those venues is the Black Genealogy Search Group of Denver, whose six members spent a year sifting through the cemetery’s 86,000 interment cards to glean the names of more than 5,000 African-Americans buried there.
The group’s project caught the attention of Lawson, author of an academic textbook on 65 antebellum African-American women who attended college.
“I could see this project giving people a real sense of the African-American community in Denver,” said Lawson, scurrying barefoot from student to student in the cemetery’s tiny office, her face alight with excitement.
She beamed when student Jeremy Wheeler discovered that Hugh Day, the African-American man he chose to research, also happened to be a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic.
“One of our students was hoping to find a black soldier, and here he is, one of the few ‘Colored’ Union veterans,” Lawson exclaimed, using the word on the interment card’s racial classification.
“I chose his name because I saw two others with the same surname,” Wheeler said.
“I definitely didn’t expect to find so many Civil War soldiers buried in Colorado.”
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
