BUDA — The Fifield-Lyford Cemetery, located northeast of Buda, has received a special Christmas touch this year.
Michelle Wirth of Buda, and her sister, Sara Morris of Buda, created Christmas bows for all the gravestones at the cemetery for the holiday season. The plots where children are buried include a bow that has a little holiday trinket hanging from it as a special way to memorialize them.
Wirth said she and her sister came up with the idea to make the bows just before Thanksgiving as something to do during the COVID pandemic. They got the help from their family and friends, who also donated ribbon. They visited the cemetery on Thanksgiving Day and placed the bows on the gravestones. They hope to make this a new tradition.
Wirth and Morris both have grown up having an interest in small cemeteries around the state. They say it’s the thrill of the mystery and history of the people who lay there that get them interested in finding out more about the earliest settlers of the area.
“It’s the things you learn when walking through the cemetery,” Wirth said. “It’s really cool.”
The Fifield-Lyford Cemetery has always been of interest to the sisters, especially having just grown up a couple country blocks away.
They remember when it was an overgrown wooded plot. The cemetery has been cleaned up a few times over the years.
In the 1970s, Helen Wildermuth of Stone Hugger Cemetery Restoration was hired to repair broken headstones in the cemetery.
Wirth uses resources at the Mason Memorial Public Library in Buda and online websites to research the people who are buried at Fifield-Lyford Cemetery. Many of the records of the cemetery have been lost and the information must be gathered in bit and pieces, but it’s been a project that Wirth and Morris are committed too, especially with more time with COVID-19.
The cemetery includes stones of people born just after the American Revolution. One such stone is for Jessie Emmerson, a man born before the formation of the U.S. who served as a prairie lawyer in the new frontier state of Illinois. Stories recount that Emmerson walked to Chicago and back to obtain his law books.