The Arizona Republic — Glendale/Peoria Community Edition — Wednesday July 25, 2001— Page 1


Photo by Michael Ging/The Arizona Republic
University of Arizona doctoral graduate student Kathy Powell takes readings with a transponder at Russian Spiritual Christian Molokan Cemetery. When scanning, the GPR antennae is slowly, steadily dragged along the ground. Here Kathy is moving the antennae, not scanning. Doctoral candidate Mike Henley supervised the scan.

High-tech search fails to uncover cemetery's secrets

by Connie Cone Sexton — The Arizona Republic

     They had hoped to unlock some of the mysteries of what lies beneath the dirt in the narrow lot of the Russian Spiritual Christian Molokan Cemetery.

     Two University of Arizona doctoral graduate students spent Friday morning scanning sweeping the ground dirt with their ground-penetrating radar (GPR) equipment, trying to survey the land. The equipment operates above ground and produces cross-sectional images on a screen showing objects below that are not soil, or are holes filled with disturbed soil.

     The mining and geo-engineering students had been hired by the Glendale Arizona congregation Molokan Church to find graves at the 1 2-acre cemetery, which is across from Independence High School on 75th Avenue just south of Glendale Avenue. [The congregation refused to pay an $800 fee to the University.]
     Dozens of people are buried in the cemetery, but congregation church records do not exist are incomplete. The cemetery dates to 1911.

     Fires over the years have destroyed some of the wooden grave markers, according to congregation church member Andrew Conovaloff.

     Unfortunately, the university's students' radar equipment couldn't penetrate the high clay content soil, and Conovaloff isn't sure what the congregation church members will do next in their efforts to have a historic record of the cemetery.

      One of the goals of the survey was to find where the graves were of children who had died during the 1918 flu epidemic.

     Conovaloff said the congregation church also would like to discover where a row of tamarisk trees had been planted.

More about GPR for grave location
Spiritual Christians in Arizona
Spiritual Christians Around the World