Modestan joins cemetery project

By Garth Stapley
gstapley@modbee.com

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Jessica Houser's passion for history turned into a short- term job on a high-intrigue search for pioneer graves.

The McHenry Museum volunteer read in The Bee about the scheme to find an unmarked 130-year-old cemetery on land that could become a huge industrial park near Crows Landing, using fancy machines that don't disturb soil.

Then Houser, 26, of Modesto e-mailed Southern California geophysicist Brian Damiata and offered to help. That doesn't happen every day, said Damiata, whose workdays in all weather typically stretch from 8 a.m. to sundown, with infrequent breaks.

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But Houser, in between jobs and college degrees, was serious. So, Damiata dismissed another technician from this job, put Houser on the payroll and is happy with the outcome.

"It's rare," he said, "but when someone wants to work on my projects, I don't turn them down. And she's very good."

The crew worked five days this week, collecting data with ground-penetrating radar and magnetics. They're off today and most of Saturday, though Damiata expects to spend Sunday conducting ground connectivity studies. The combination of methods helps him analyze whether someone has disturbed the soil at any time over thousands of years.

"We hit it with everything we have," Damiata said Thursday. He'll feed it all into a computer and spend about two days analyzing data for each day in the field.

That means Pat Snoke of Gustine won't know for two weeks, and maybe four, where her great- grandmother's final resting place might be.

"If anybody is going to find any bodies out there, it'll be this group," said Snoke, who made daily trips to the site just to watch. She helped piece together the cemetery's probable location from family lore and ancient journals.

Ellen O'Connell migrated from Ireland and married a man who was killed in the Civil War before coming to these parts and marrying Snoke's great-grandfather. O'Connell, whose married names were Bird and Niddrie, probably was buried in 1885, and a son, Snoke's great-uncle, followed a couple of years later at age 22.

"It's been 20 years I've been working on this, so I hope they find it," Snoke said.

Damiata, who has detected graves all over the world, has stressed from the start that the high-tech procedure carries no guarantees. He works for Earth Tech, hired by West Park's Gerry Kamilos, who wants to build a 4,800-acre industrial complex on a former naval air base.

Houser, a 2001 Downey High School graduate, obtained degrees in ethnic studies and native American studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She's awaiting word on applications for graduate school, where she hopes to study history.

The Crows Landing experience "is exciting," she said. "It's hard work but it's really interesting."

Bee staff writer Garth Stapley can be reached at gstapley@modbee.com or 578-2390.