ALBANY COUNTY — On a calm Sunday morning, a headstone made a 20-mile journey back to its home, an abandoned cemetery plot. Over half-a-dozen people helped to get it there.

How the 1880 headstone traveled from its shady patch of earth on Tan Hollow Road in Westerlo to the backyard of a beauty salon in Guilderland remains a mystery.

Kelly Iacobucci bought a small foreclosed brick home on Western Avenue to start her business — Hair Event LLC — with her mother, Audrey, two years ago. She said she had observed a small headstone in the backyard leaning against a fence after buying the house, but left it alone for some time as they cleaned up the yard and laid down blacktop for a parking lot, but she eventually noticed that the stone was inscribed with a girl’s name and a death date of 1880.

Iacobucci and her mother have penned mystery novels together, but the mystery of the headstone proved tough to crack. They spoke to two previous owners of the house, one who lived there shortly after it was built in the 1950s, and another who lived there in the 1970s; neither recalled a gravestone sitting in the backyard. Because the home was foreclosed on, the more recent previous owners were unknown.

Iacobucci realized that there was someone who would not only know how to track down the resting place of the headstone, but who would enjoy it as well. She had been cutting the hair of Carla Sofka for almost 30 years, and had come to call her a friend.

Sofka, a professor of social work at Siena College, punctuates her studies of death and dying with visits to graveyards, funeral homes, and cemetery caretakers.

Sofka’s interest in death, dying, and grief began over 30 years ago, when she started cataloguing information from hundreds of clips of obituaries into a computer in the 1980s, followed by a thesis project for which she interviewed widows and widowers about their dead spouses. She now teaches a class on the subject, bringing students on a field trip to the Albany Rural Cemetery.

Sofka’s search  with the 1880 marker started with figuring out where to buy wax for a headstone rubbing to better understand what it said. While she could not make out the first name, the last name read “Wineberger,” with a birth date of June 15, 1879, and a death date of March 29, 1880 —  the child had lived only nine months. The stone also said that she was the daughter of Casper and Louise Wineberger, though most records spell the name “Weinberger,” which Sofka searched for on the website “Find a Grave,” and located a shared headstone at a cemetery in Westerlo.

The Enterprise — H. Rose Schneider
Lee Ackerman-Sawyer looks through cemetery records at the Westerlo Public Library. Using the records, she helped with the search for where a missing headstone belonged.

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The Enterprise — H. Rose Schneider
“Missing stone,” written on a cemetery map marks where a headstone that was recently found in Guilderland belongs: 20 miles away in Westerlo.

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She went to the Guilderland Public Library, where a genealogist visits on the second Wednesday of every month. The two located federal census data from 1880, but the child was not listed, although her parents and sisters were. She wasn’t listed in the New York State census either, because the census occurred four years before her birth in 1875.

The genealogist, Lisa Dougherty, often receives inquiries about family members, particularly as interest in family history has picked up with genealogy companies becoming more popular; she herself is also contracted under Ancestry.com. But she said, out of the many libraries she visits over the year, she only sees cases like Sofka’s once or twice, and it’s usually relating to the past owners of a home.

Dougherty recommended Sofka visit the Westerlo Public Library to look up records about the graves. So on the following Saturday, Sofka visited the library, where she met Lee Ackerman-Sawyer, an employee there who had vast information at the ready on cemeteries in town.

“So she goes to her bookshelf and she pulls out these two blue binders … ,” said Sofka.

In fact, the library has seven blue binders, each corresponding to a cemetery or a group of cemeteries, organized by size and location. Ackerman-Sawyer called them a “treasure trove.” The binders were assembled by a former Westerlo historian, the late Thurman Bishop Jr., she said.

In the early 1990s, Bishop had visited both active and abandoned grave plots for the information, and then, using a typewriter, wrote out the lists, cross-referencing with other town records, she said. He mapped out areas where carriages were surmised to have crossed, noted what cemeteries had been moved — either to go with their families or to avoid construction of the Alcove and Basic Creek reservoirs — and determined veteran statuses of Civil War soldiers by reviewing their exemption papers.

“I’ve done this a lot,” Ackerman-Sawyer remarked, of reviewing town records, often for people who have family history in Westerlo. But she said that a search for the rightful place of a lost headstone is highly unusual.

Ackerman-Sawyer herself is fascinated by history, which surrounds her at the town library. The building was once a general store, and hanging on a wall are photos of its past owners like Vernon Whitford and Harold Bell, pictured with his girlfriend and later wife, Helen Taylor, in a 1920s’ dress and pearls.

Ackerman-Sawyer had also interviewed elderly residents years ago about what Westerlo was like over a century ago, and how it was, she said, “a bonafide metropolis,” full of different businesses.

Sofka found the Weinbergers listed in what was called the Slade-Kingsley-Powell cemetery, located on Tan Hollow Road at the base of a hill overlooking the Hannacrois Creek. Again, there were the child’s parents and siblings listed with numbers corresponding to their headstones, but not the mysterious child.

“And we don’t find anyone with this name and date of death listed here … ,” said Sofka. “So we’re a little mystified and then the librarian says ‘Well, wait a minute; they drew a map of the cemetery, of the stones.’”

Sofka said Ackerman-Sawyer noted that each cemetery had a map hand-drawn by Bishop in the blue binders. It was here, between two other family members’ graves that Bishop had marked, with two little rectangles, “stone missing.” The headstone, they surmised, had been missing for at least 23 years.

Iacobucci was shocked to find out the headstone had traveled from Westerlo, in part because she had once lived on Dunbar Hollow Road, not far from the headstone’s original home.

Sofka next contacted Westerlo’s historian, Dennis Fancher, who researched the Weinberger family. Fancher said that the child’s father, Casper Weinberger, was recorded as living in Westerlo for 16 years, but Fancher believes from looking at records of land ownership that he was in town longer.

Weinberger and his first wife immigrated from Germany, said Fancher, but he married twice after. Described as a gardener, Weinberger owned several parcels of land in town, said Fancher.

The Weinbergers’ graves appear to be the first at the cemetery, he said, as they sit at the front on the western edge of the land. In total, about 90 people are buried in the cemetery, which is no longer active.

The cemetery property is listed as belonging to Frank Hempstead, but Fancher said Hempstead had told him that the cemetery was taken off his deed, but he hasn’t been able to verify to whom the land belongs to now.

“There was a time people were stealing gravestones and making coffee tables out of it,” said Fancher, though he said that it was unlikely that this was the case with this gravestone because it’s so small.

“I’ve heard of stones missing,” he said, but he said that is usually due to a stream or a creek washing them away.

During her research, Sofka had kept the headstone wrapped in a blue sheet in the back of her car. The stone had suffered from discoloration after being left under what must have been some metal or fertilizer, she said. She has gotten to know a volunteer who cleans headstones at the Albany Rural Cemetery, but didn’t know whether to simply brush it off or clean it thoroughly.

“If we clean it, but not her family’s, they’re going to look very, very different,” she said.

In the end, Fancher cleaned it with water and a soft brush so it would not appear different from the other headstones.

Then, for a while, the headstone remained in the lobby of Iacobucci’s salon.

“It’s quite a conversation piece,” Iacobucci remarked.

On Saturday, Fancher picked up the headstone from Iacobucci’s shop. The following day, the half dozen who had been connected by the stone — Sofka; Fancher and his wife, Sue, who also does historical research; and Iacobucci and her mother, Audrey, as well as her husband Todd Smith — convened at Tan Hollow Road where the child and her relatives are buried.

The child’s parents share a headstone that has since been knocked over — Sofka intends to raise money online to get it upright, and Fancher hopes to borrow a tripod to lift it. Casper Weinberger was born in Germany in 1835 and died at age 69 in 1905. His wife, Louisa, who is buried next to him, was born in 1836 and died after her husband.

To the left of them is their 11-year-old daughter, Libbie, as well their 12-year-old daughter Mary in an unmarked grave. To Casper Weinberger’s right is his previous wife, Barbary Smith, and Margaret Weinberger, the daughter of Casper Weinberger, and another wife — he had three wives in total, two of whom are buried with him.

The nine-month-old — Fancher later inferred that her name was Margaretha — had been placed between Smith and the daughter Margaret.

It was at this spot that Fancher dug a small hole in the ground for the stone to fit into. Sofka brought a pot with white chrysanthemums that she placed at the foot of the grave.

“She’s back where she belongs,” remarked Fancher.