The Kodai cemetery that went digital

Friends of the American Mission Cemetery have made it possible to link residents with their descendants across the world

At the American Mission Cemetery

“I’m the Keeper of the Crypt,” says Beulah Kolhatkar. She’s only half-joking. For over 20 years, the educator and entrepreneur has cared for the American Mission Cemetery (AMC) in Kodaikanal or as it is better known, the Old Cemetery of the Church Under the Hill. Over the lockdown, Kolhatkar teamed up with retired museum curator Julian Donahue to take things further, documenting, digitising, and memorialising all the cemetery’s residents online for access by their descendants across the world.

When Kolhatkar moved in next door to the cemetery two decades ago, she noticed that years of neglect had made it an overgrown mass of weeds, and trash. The last funeral there had been held in 1904; in 1990, vandals had stolen almost every bit of metal, including the ornate fences and the metal work on graves.

Educator and entrepreneur Beulah Kolhatkar

First, the clean up

“Cemeteries tell you the history of places,” says Kolhatkar, 62, who started taking action almost immediately. She cleared out the weeds, fixed fencing, and chased away “loiterers, boozers, and pizza eaters”. Friends, family and students pitched in. She was helped by Sunderlingam, who helped battle the thorny raspberry bushes. Grass started to grow, bison began visiting; graves and headstones and broken bits of headstones were uncovered, tidied up, restored, and flowers planted.

“Kodaikanal is unique in that it is the only hill station set up by American missionaries,” says Barbara Gail Block, archivist at the Kodaikanal International School (KIS). Her records include details about the place’s history, including permission to erect a monument (for the church) and a register of burials, some from the school itself. In his book

Veil of Mist , about the history of Kodaikanal, author Badri Vijayaraghavan documents that the American Mission Cemetery was part of the grounds of the Church Under the Hill, Kodaikanal’s first church, completed in 1858.

Retired museum curator Julian Donahue

The Church was demolished in 1902 and in 1908 a granite pillar was erected to mark the spot where it stood. It now falls under the Church of South India.

43 memorials and counting

In 2018, the pursuit of the White-bellied Sholakili near the cemetery connected Kolhatkar with Donahue. Donahue is a KIS alumnus based in Arizona, whose collection of 16,000 butterflies from India (collected before the Wildlife Protection Act) now resides at the entomology museum at Michigan State University. When the world went into lockdown in 2020, while researching his own family history and posting it on Ancestry.com, he discovered that AMC had only two memorials online, that too with incorrect information.

Domino, a three legged dog, sitting on the commemorative granite pillar that marks the spot where the original church once stood

Kolhatkar, with Sundarlingam, who did the hard labour, and Donahue’s friends Sarah Ann and Merrick Lockwood, who were stuck in Kodaikanal for four months during the lockdown, cleaned and made epitaphs visible, and photographed the headstones, while Donahue bought books and researched and documented the cemetery’s residents on FindAGrave.com. Forty-three well documented memorials, with details of the person’s stay in India, death, and their family, now exist online.

Some of them include Dr John Scudder Jr, MD, son of the India’s first American medical missionary and father of Ida Scudder, who founded the Christian Medical College and Hospital, Vellore. There’s also David Coit Scudder who came to India on June 26, 1861 (not related to the Scudders), and drowned in the Vaigai river, on November 19, 1862. Every year, on his death anniversary, a small procession from the village he worked in, still comes up to lay flowers at his grave. Other occupants of the cemetery include a ‘Baby’, with no name and just the date ‘Aug 25, 1901, an enigma.