🌿 Giving Tuesday: Restore, Protect, and Preserve Greenlawn Cemetery 🌿

This Giving Tuesday, The Friends of Greenlawn Cemetery is calling on the community to help save a historic sacred ground where countless families still come searching for their loved ones—only to discover that overgrowth, sinking graves, and decades of neglect have hidden the very places where their ancestors rest. Week after week, we receive calls from sons, daughters, and grandchildren desperate to find a mother, a father, a sibling, or a grandparent. Some of these families drive from hours away, only to stand in fields of tall grass with no path forward. And in the back of the cemetery, beyond the areas most people can reach, there are veterans whose final resting places still have not been found—men and women who served this country, yet now lie in sections overtaken by time, weather, and overgrowth.

A small team of volunteers has been fighting to reclaim this ground with their own hands, their own tools, and their own money. After four years of waiting, we finally received donated lawn mowers, weed wackers, and trimmers—equipment that could finally help us reach the hidden areas families have searched for. But just as we began making progress, tragedy struck. The storage shed was broken into, and fourteen Milwaukee batteries—the power source for every piece of donated equipment—were stolen overnight. In an instant, the work stopped. The volunteers who were already paying out of pocket for gas, tools, and supplies were left with no way to continue.

We are a 100% volunteer-driven organization, and we even pay our own insurance so we can legally operate on the grounds. But now, without a camera surveillance system, the cycle of theft, vandalism, and illegal dumping will continue—and every battery we replace will remain at risk. Greenlawn requires more than $30,000 a season to maintain, and that does not include the deeper restoration work: clearing overgrowth, lifting sunken graves, cleaning headstones buried in soil and moss, fertilizing the grounds, and uncovering the forgotten corners where veterans and loved ones are still waiting to be found.  

Every inch of Greenlawn that has been restored was done by volunteers who refused to let history disappear. But we cannot do this alone. Your donation  will replace stolen batteries, secure the cemetery with cameras, support insurance needs, and give volunteers the resources to keep uncovering the graves families are still searching for.

No family should be unable to find their loved one.
No veteran should lie in a place no one can reach.
No historic cemetery should be left to disappear.

With your help, we can restore Greenlawn, protect it, and ensure that every loved one—every ancestor, every veteran—is honored with dignity.