M.B. Church receives grant for cemetery project
STAR-JOURNAL STAFF
A grant recently awarded to the Hillsboro Mennonite Brethren Church will help it compile years of data about a century-old cemetery.
This month, the Kansas Humanities Council awarded $2,850 in grant money to the M.B. church for a project that will map out plots and organize information from the church's historic 100-year-old cemetery. The cemetery sits just west of the Historic Mennonite Brethren Church, across the street from the Tabor College campus.
The church applied for the grant around the beginning of June, thanks to the grant-writing skills of church member Glenn Wiebe.
Wiebe knew that the Kansas Humanities Council awarded grants of $3,500 or less to state historical societies and other historic preservation groups. So he decided to draft a grant application for his church, send it off — and it worked.
The grant money will be mostly used for hiring data-entry help when the time comes to start cataloging data, Wiebe said.
That will be a daunting task, considering that the wealth of information about the cemetery has never been completely organized, he said. It could take 300 to 500 man-hours of work to complete the project.
But ultimately, the project's goal is to organize the information into a database that individuals could peruse on the M.B. archives Web site. The church would also like to print up a booklet with the information and maps, Wiebe said.
Church member Ray Wiebe is heading up the project. He declined to be interviewed for this story.
