On Thursday, August 18, 2022, more than 66 years after her death, Margaret Mary Holzschuh’s headstone was settled into place at Our Mother of Sorrows Cemetery.
Holzschuh’s granddaughter, Gail Farrar, of Glenrock, Wyoming, worked with church and cemetery officials beginning in early 2022 to have the grave officially recognized in the family plot and a marker placed.
According to Farrar, a Greece native, the grave went unmarked due to a dispute among Holzschuh’s sons about where to bury her and how to mark her plot. Over time, the base placed at the head of the grave became overgrown with vegetation, obscuring the place where a marker would have been laid.
Last summer, Farrar and her husband Ray Farrar, who has been doing genealogy research on their families for several years, visited relatives in Greece. They went to Our Mother of Sorrows to photograph some family headstones, which are frequently used as records for genealogy research, and Farrar became interested in having a headstone placed for her grandmother. However, she learned it would be an uphill battle as church records didn’t verify the location of the grave in the now-closed cemetery.
In June 2022, Farrar returned to Greece and contacted Donald M. Rath, president of John H. McGee & Son, to have a marker made. Once the base for the headstone was located under several inches of turf, church officials granted the request to place the marker.
Holzschuh, who died in 1956, a year before Farrar was born, was a lifelong Greece resident and first generation American, born to German immigrants in 1882. She had one daughter and four sons.
Having her grandmother’s grave recognized made her feel her grandmother could finally be at peace, according to Farrar.
“It felt like my grandmother’s soul was floating around as though nobody knew where she was,” Farrar said. “I remember distinctly putting flowers on her grave. I knew where she was, but my grandma needed to be recognized just like everybody else in the family.”
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