Tonganoxie ? Connie Putthoff looks deep into the brush and spots a stone sticking out of the ground. She ventures a few feet into the ankle-high mixture of grass and weeds to take a closer look at what could be a headstone at Davenport Cemetery south of Tonganoxie.

Jeff Culbertson and Mike Megee attempt to make out an inscription on a headstone in the Davenport Cemetery south of Tonganoxie while Connie Putthoff looks for other engravings. Culbertson, Putthoff and Megee are part of a small group attempting to locate and catalog all of the cemeteries in Leavenworth County.

“There’s another one,” she excitedly calls out to the rest of the group, asking for them to come over.

She can’t get to the headstone without first clipping away some vegetation. Putthoff asks Theresa Megee to get a set of hedge clippers from her bag while Megee’s husband, Mike, starts to clear away grass with his hands.

The headstone, which is missing a large diagonal half, marks the final resting place of an unknown soul with two pieces of information: “Died Sept. 1874” and the last name “Warren.”

Jim Claunch takes a picture and marks the headstone on his map as Linda DiSanto writes the inscription in a notebook.

Trudging through weed-infested graveyards in 90-degree weather under a scorching afternoon sun might not sound like loads of fun to many people. But for these Leavenworth County residents interested in preserving and documenting local history, there isn’t a better way to spend the weekend.

“History is just part of what I like to do,” said Putthoff, president of the Tonganoxie Community Historical Society. “I like stuff like this; it’s just fun.”

For the past three months, Putthoff, the Megees and DiSanto have joined Claunch and Jeff Culbertson, the county’s geographic information system director, on a gravesite mapping project.

The project started when Claunch, a former Army man who still works at Fort Leavenworth, began mapping old gravesites. It was a way to return a favor to the people who had helped him find family information in Texas from a Web site where the users freely volunteer to answer genealogical questions.

“I asked a guy down in Texas to help me find my great-grandmother’s headstone. The guy spent the better part of a weekend looking for the headstone,” Claunch said. “I asked if there was any way I could pay him back. He said I should just volunteer to help other people, so I volunteered for Leavenworth County.”

After some time, Claunch came to see Culbertson about finding a cemetery. He had hoped the county would have the site on record, but he had no luck.

“I get someone in here every other week, asking to tell them where an ancestor was buried,” Culbertson said. “They figured the county has an index of the cemeteries, but we don’t because many of them are individual gravesites or private.”

Because the county only had gravesite records for some larger cemeteries, Claunch gave Culbertson information he had been collecting for years about various gravesites. The information allowed Culbertson to create a countywide map of small cemeteries. The map now contains 117 cemeteries and burial sites throughout the county.

Putthoff and Theresa Megee recently got in contact with Culbertson, who then connected them with Claunch. Now, every couple of weeks the group gets together to plan which cemeteries it will visit next.

The group’s main goal is to catalog every gravestone and create a database of information from county records, inscriptions on the gravestones, digital photographs of the grave markers and even GPS coordinates of the sites.

The group’s secondary goal is to find a way to maintain and preserve the cemeteries and headstones, which can date to the mid-19th century.

Because Kansas statutes dictate that counties are responsible for cemeteries, Culbertson hopes to secure county funding and support for a comprehensive restoration and maintenance plan.

For now, Putthoff said, the group is looking for volunteers and is especially interested in anyone who knows where other small burial sites are.

“Our job is not over yet; we’re just going to keep going until we get finished,” she said.