Staff photo by Gage Cureton Darla Gebhard, research librarian at Brown County Historical Society, leads a cemetery tour at the New Ulm Cemetery Sunday. The Brown County Historical Society’s commemoration of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 ended Sunday, with a walking tour of the pioneer section of the New Ulm Cemetery.

NEW ULM — You can tell a lot about a town by its cemetery.

The Brown County Historical Society’s commemoration of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 ended Sunday, with a walking tour of the pioneer section of the New Ulm Cemetery.

The tour, which occurs annually during the commemoration, serves to educate the public about New Ulm history and to teach the symbolism seen in cemeteries.

Darla Gebhard, research librarian at Brown County Historical Society, said about 60 to 70 people buried in the pioneer section of the cemetery had lived during or had lost their lives during the U.S.-Dakota War. She said she can’t provide a definite number as to how many are buried there because records are hard to come by.

However, Gebhard said family members of the deceased are often sure that they are indeed buried in the cemetery, but don’t know the specific location.

“Their families say they’re buried in the New Ulm city cemetery, yet we don’t know where,” Gebhard said. “Part of that is because the early cemetery records were in German script.”

Because much of the population of New Ulm had spoken German and kept documents written in the language, it can be difficult to pinpoint names and the locations of their graves.

“At some point in time they destroyed those records, but before they destroyed them, they transcribed them,” Gebhard said. “But they didn’t transcribe them correctly.”

Although records and names can be hard to come by, Gebhard said she’s still discovering locations of graves.

For instance, Gebhard said she was searching for the location of the May family.

“So one case was the Mays,” she said. “Sebastian May and his wife Barbara May who was related to the Gross from the Grand Hotel here, and their two children. They didn’t know where they were buried.”

She said she came across the location where the Mays were buried when she was viewing microfilm cemetery records and she found Sebastian’s name filed as ‘May, Sebastian.’ She said she believes that when the German records were translated into English, human error occurred and whoever had transposed the records had thought Sebastian was female and his first name was May.

“They had transposed their names and there’s others that have spelling errors that are significant enough that they’re difficult to find,” Gebhard said. “So they lost a lot in the translation from the German to the English.”

Gebhard said a lot of the headstones and cemetery sites can tell about the history of New Ulm.

“A lot of the stones are inscribed in German,” Gebhard said. “You can tell by the language that they use. You can tell if there was a battle by the stones that say ‘killed by the Dakota.’ You can tell that there was disease because you have all of these graves of young children that die in a small time period. We know through research that it is because of the diphtheria epidemic that went through.”

Gage Cureton can be emailed at gcureton@nujournal.com.