The HistoryBuff.com Pepsi Grant Proposal ended up in 200th place when voting ended. Unfortunately, only the top 10 for each category receive funding. The overall top 100 get a second chance for voting.

I am not a quitter. Since I am unable to resubmit my grant proposal to Pepsi, I am going to try a grass roots approach. I see on my subscriber list several are employed by major media companies, universities or Fortune 500 companies. I have prepared a more formal grant proposal and saved it in PDF format. To download it, click here. Then, if you are an employee of a university, if you will, give the chairman of the history department a copy of my proposal and pitch the proposal. If you work for a major media source or a Fortune 500 company, go to the marketing director and pitch the grant. Perhaps, they will want to sponsor the project for branding purposes. If you work for a larger nonprofit organization or foundation, pitch the idea to them. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Rick Brown

In the summer of 1980 I was down at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky doing some wilderness camping. To get to the campsites, I had to drive about four miles down a dirt road. At the end of the road was a parking lot and a one-room church. From there it was a hike in to your campsite The church was literally falling down. Beside the church was a cemetery. As I wandered the graveyard, I noticed the most recent burial was prior to WWI. In the back corner was a set of six graves from the same family that had died on the same day in 1856. The first grave marker had the woman's name, birth and death date - July 7, 1856. The next five markers contained the same information on each: Baby Green, Died July 7, 1856. It appeared likely that the mother died in childbirth and all of the babies were either stillborn or died shortly thereafter. Imagine that! Quintuplets born in 1856!

I work for Redbox and recently two new kiosks in a diffrent city were added to my route. While driving down the two-lane highway to get to the new kiosks, I noticed a small graveyard beside the road. Not the typical small-town cemetery, but a small one of about ten grave markers in one corner of a farm. The first time I passed it by as I was going to fast to stop - 55 miles per hour. The second time, I missed it all together. The third time I managed to stop in time. I parked my car between the road and cemetery and took a walk though the little cemetery. There were ten grave markers. The newest one was for a 14-year-old girl that died in 1870. Four of the markers were too worn to read any information on them. Two of the markers were for people born in the late 1700s and likely died in territorial Michigan. (Michigan became a state in 1837.)

Along this line, I've always wondered what happened to all the family plots when relatives were buried on their own farm. Or, like in the movies, with a wagon train headed west, when people died they were buried near where they died and the rest of the family moved on. What happened to these graves?

I do know of one instance here in Lansing, Michigan where an entire cemetery was moved in 1871. According to the local newspaper, the bodies were exhumed and moved to a new cemetery. Ironically, today the ground where the original cemetery was is now an elementary school!