A Lincoln man and his family recently learned they had a relative buried at Wyuka Cemetery without a grave marker for 117 years. Mary Soukup died July 15 from injuries in the floods of 1908. Her great-great grandson is John Soukup and he tells KLIN news he made a remarkable discovery that led them to their long, lost relative.
“I’ve lived in Lincoln for 30 years, drove down O Street plenty of times, not knowing I had a relative buried in this cemetery,” Soukup says. “They have a map where you can look up where people are buried, so I found the plot where she was buried, but I couldn’t find any indication that she was actually there. Turns out it was an unmarked grave.”
Moved by the discovery, the Soukup family felt a deep spiritual prompting to act as a response to a core teaching of their Catholic faith. “As a family, we felt called to honor her life and dignity,” Soukup says. “One of the corporal works of mercy in our Catholic faith is to ‘bury the dead’, to show respect even long after someone is gone.”
Soukup says the family came up with the funds and had a tombstone made for her after 117 years. For Soukup and his family the discovery came at a time of personal grief, following the recent death of his mother.
“We had a lot of questions as we were going through mom’s things that we didn’t get answered,” Soukup says. “And now we’re discovering there’s even more questions we didn’t get answered with past relatives. So this is giving us a sense of closure, that we’ve discovered something, we’ve gotten some answers on a little bit of family history that we didn’t know about.”
The Soukup family will gather at Mary’s newly marked grave Tuesday evening for a memorial service and to pay their respects.