Bethlen Almanac 1999 (Ligonier)

The Hungarian Reformed Federation of America

collecting photographs of monuments of Hungarians in the United States, and he categorized the Hungarian Cemetery as one of those. He said he considers these monuments, such as the one erected in Connellsville, a small Pennsylvania mining town, in memory of a large group of coal miners killed in a mine accident there in 1907, to be tributes to some of the people who helped build America.

Dr. Molnár also visited the Oxbow Center to see the Dante History Project and said that it’s a shame that more work like the Dante Project isn’t being done throughout the country. “It’s almost impossible to write the history of an area on a large scale,” he said, “without having this kind of work available.” He commented on the high quality of work involved in the Dante Project, and added that it’s almost too late for oral histories of early settlers and immigrants to be collected in some regions of the country.

According to George Campbell, Scout member Shane Kenyon has already put in the time required for his Eagle project, but the group intends to complete the clearing of the cemetery and will then mow it. Some more Scouts, Campbell said, are in line to list the names and dates on all the headstones, a project that will probably begin after the first of the year. Campbell also hopes they will map the cemetery so that the site of each grave is identified in relationship to the others. All of that information will eventually be included on the Russell County Public Library’s database on the Internet so that genealogy researchers the world over will have access to it.

Ann Gregory Clinch Valley Times, Vol. XLII, No. 32, August 12. 1999, Saint Paul, Virginia (Reproduced with permission; edited for length)

If anyone wishes to visit the graveyard, please call Kathy Shearer at 540-619-2271 to arrange for a visit. They also have a website which they encourage the readers to visit: www.peopleincorp.org/dante1 .html.This includes a Guest Book where Dante folks sign in with their memories.

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