Wynooche cemetery can now be visited online
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, September 2, 2025
When Chey Smith was hired as a deputy clerk for the city of Montesano in 2019, being the point of contact for the Wynooche Cemetery was an assigned responsibility. And with this responsibility came a large book that detailed who was buried, where, and when, and how much they paid for a plot in the city-owned cemetery.
“I instantly was drawn to this information and wanted to make it easily accessible to people because it’s history,” Smith said.
Originally called Mound Cemetery, the cemetery had its first burial in April 1871 — a Mrs. Marcellus Luark (Frances Redman Luark) — and the city assumed ownership in 1890. Smith receives requests from family members or researchers with Find a Grave for information regarding burial records.
“There are weeks where we don’t receive any and then there are weeks where we would receive many,” Smith said, adding that there’s not a fee to fulfill the requests. “The only thing we charge for the cemetery is plots and then opening and closing for burials.”
To make answering the requests easier, Smith began transcribing the information into an Excel spreadsheet, which took up most of 2019. The book is comprised of editions that reflect the cemetery’s expansion over the past 154 years, and the 8th edition covers the newest section of the cemetery. When people come in-person to view the book, they have to open the book gingerly and turn the pages with care.
The transcribing wasn’t straightforward; the handwriting in the oldest pages of the book is unreadable, said Smith. Coincidentally, some names on the headstones are illegible too because the headstone has eroded.
In addition to entering the individual’s name into Excel, Smith also had to include the block or lot, the grave number and their specific location, as there could be multiple people interned in a grave. While transcribing Smith found help in the Wynooche Cemetery index written by Victoria “Vicki” Fenton for the Grays Harbor Genealogical Society.
After the hiring of Gretchen Sagen as the CFO/City Clerk, Smith proposed the idea of digitizing the records.
“I want[ed] to make it easier for people to come and find their loved ones,” she said.
Sagen agreed that something needed to be done, and they brought it to the council, who approved for them to contract with a company to build and host an online database. Smith investigated several companies, eventually selecting Chronicle.
“They offered a really great package,” Smith said, adding “[They] had so much to offer that was really nice and made it really easy to get our records put over.”
The Wynooche Cemetery website went live the last week of May. Smith said there are still some things they’re working to correct but “people have been seeming to enjoy it.” The website has an aerial view of the cemetery, which was obtained using drones. Users can zoom into a specific plot to view the headstone and see their date of birth and death, and internment date.
This website is a continuation of how recording the cemetery information has changed over the decades. In the book, handwriting gave way to a typewriter, and back to handwriting when Smith adds new entries or corrects old entries, but these new records are also electronic.
“We are still adding to this book and I still add to my Excel [spreadsheet],” Smith said. “Because we are so new to the digital, we need to make sure that we’re still keeping proper records here, just in case.”
To visit the Wynooche Cemetery website, visit https://map.chronicle.rip/?org=City%20of%20Montesano.
