Volunteers needed to clean up veterans graves

The Royal Oak Memorial Society is looking for volunteers as it gets ready to clean more than 2,000 military veteran gravesites next week.

Carol Hennessey, president of the memorial society, said the graves will be cleaned starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 16, at Oakview Cemetery.

“Everyone is welcome to help us,” she said. “We encourage Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, sports teams, or anyone that wants to lend a hand.”

Volunteers need to bring rakes, clippers, gloves, rags and water to Oakview Cemetery.

Tools to clean around headstones are also helpful, such as weed whackers, and brooms or rags to clean off the headstones after removing the grass.

The cemetery is on Rochester Road, just south of 12 Mile Road, on the east side.

Though the Royal Oak Memorial Society started more than a century ago, Hennessey started the gravesite cleaning effort several years after she joined in 1997.

“We were placing flags on the gravesites and I stepped in a hole and twisted my foot,” she said. “There was a grave marker there covered by grass and I didn’t even see it. That’s when I thought we had to start cleaning the veterans gravesites so we could find them.”

Things have changed since then.

There were only about 500 veterans buried at Oakview Cemetery when Hennessey first joined the memorial society.

She estimates there are now at least 2,400 such sites at the cemetery.

“We are getting more and more veterans who are dying,” Hennessey said.

As time passes, many of the relatives of the veterans buried at Oakview have also passed away, so there is no one tending a great number of the gravesites.

There were about five or six people who volunteered when the annual cleanup project began. Now, from 50 to 60 people turn out to volunteer.

The Royal Oak Memorial Society in the spring also does a gravesite cleanup and places small U.S. flags on each one before Memorial Day.

Garbage bags are provided by the memorial society and the cleanup typically lasts for about two hours.

Volunteers foregather just inside the cemetery near the pond. If it rains Saturday, Oct.16, the cleanup will be rescheduled for the following Saturday on Oct. 23.