The Ravenna Elks Lodge #1076 held its second annual chili cook-off fundraising event on Feb. 1, with all proceeds going to Chris Untrauer’s veteran grave-marking project at Portage County cemeteries.
A massive crowd of more than 130 people showed up for the event and, as a result, the chili disappeared fast.
“The turnout was outstanding,” lodge Trustee Matt Moore said. “It was hard to imagine we started running out of chili less than a half an hour after the doors opened. Last year when we did it, we started running out of chili about an hour and a half after the doors opened. It was a lot busier and a lot crazier last night, so good problems to have.”
The chili cook-off raised more than $3,000 for Untrauer’s grave-marking project.
Since 2014, Untrauer has been locating unmarked veteran’s gravesites at Maple Grove Cemetery and documenting them at the Find a Grave website.
“She went through my whole cemetery and put them on Find a Grave, took pictures of every stone,” Maple Grove Cemetery Superintendent Mark Gabriel said. “Now she’s in the process of, when the weather gets nice, she’ll start again by going through and hooking them all to GPS. You could sit in your living room and it’ll drive you to the cemetery and walk you right to the grave. It’s amazing. She’s been coming in and going section by section and we’ve been pulling materials out and finding people that were missed, maybe wrong in my computer, or may just be initials in my computer, and we have real names now from the 1800s. She doesn’t want any credit for this, but what she does is just, no one has ever gone to the depths she has since I’ve been up there. She’s taken it to another level.”
Before Untrauer’s project was chosen as the recipient of this year’s fundraiser, Moore had planned to donate the funds from the event to a veterans association, but he found it difficult to find one with a direct allocation for the money.
“Believe it or not, it was kind of hard to find one that just didn’t want the money to spend how they wanted,” Moore said. “We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to allocate for something that we knew exactly what they needed. We couldn’t find one, and then during the veterans dinner that we put on, Chris [Untrauer] came up and was talking to myself and my cousin and told us about her project for the installation of the grave markers. I was like, you know what, that’s it, that’s what we’re going to do. So that’s kind of how all that fell into place.”
The donation money from the Elks fundraiser comes from a restricted fund account, so the checks are written directly to Untrauer for the resources needed for the project, which is mainly to pay for the installation of the grave markers that are provided by the VA.
The first grave site she fortified with an official marker was for Vietnam veteran PFC Willie Ross Dennis last fall, which was followed by an official ceremony.
Untrauer works with Gabriel to locate gravesites, then she goes through the VA to get the official markers.
“Everything goes through archives at the VA in Washington,” Untrauer said. “There are forms available online, so I’m able to pull those forms off and fill them out. Then, to get these markers, I actually have to go to the VA in Ravenna and have them sign off, plus the cemetery. The cemetery has to say, yes, they’re really buried here. The [Ravenna] VA has to be my representative so I can get the markers.”
Along with Maple Grove Cemetery, she’s also been working with Grandview Memorial Cemetery and is currently ready to order 14 grave markers, with nine that will be ready to order in the near future.
Another fundraising project she undertook was collecting the flags that were placed at veteran’s gravesites on Memorial Day at Maple Grove. She then washed them, folded them in the traditional triangle style and made ornaments out of them. They can be purchased for $15.
Untrauer also has a dinner with music fundraising event coming up in May, but the details haven’t been released yet.
Untrauer is persistent in her endeavor to mark every unmarked veteran’s grave in the county, but with more than 17,000 gravesites at Maple Grove alone, she has a big job ahead of her.
“Down the road I’ll probably have to have help, because think of how many cemeteries are in this county,” Untrauer said. “We’ll get ’er done.”
If you’d like to donate to Untrauer’s project, you can send a check to Ravenna Elks Lodge #1076, 776 N. Freedom St., Ravenna, OH 44266, and write “veteran’s grave marker project” in the memo section of the check.
