WARM BEACH – The headstone from a World War II Marine veteran’s grave that mysteriously turned up in a rural yard 50 miles south of Bellingham’s Bayview Cemetery may finally be going back to its proper resting place.
The woman who initially discovered the headstone more than a year ago, Joyce Newsome, assumed that it had been stolen and dumped by vandals because the rental home is at the end of a rural road.
She believed it had been retrieved until the tenants moved out recently and she found that it was still there.
She began trying to find the family of the man inscribed on the headstone and called The Herald for help.
“I would hope that it would be returned to the rightful place,” Newsome said. “Maybe he has some family in the area.”
It’s no longer a mystery where the stone came from. But how it ended up several miles south of Stanwood and what happens next is still unknown.
The headstone is for Theodore H. Sundhausen, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II who lived from 1904 to 1979.
It’s is a standard-issue grave marker of the kind given to veterans, said Tim Boulay, a spokesman for the National Cemetery Administration in Washington, D.C., which is part of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“It appears to be one of ours,” Boulay said after examining an e-mailed photo of the headstone. “The VA does occasionally get calls about mystery headstones. The reasons vary. Some have been legitimately displaced, while others are duplicates or misspellings that have not been destroyed by the manufacturer.”
Sundhausen died Oct. 29, 1979, and was buried in Bayview Cemetery in Bellingham. He had lived there with his wife, Lila, for 33 years, according to an obituary in the Bellingham Herald.
The headstone was probably never installed, said Karen Johnson, a cemetery assistant at Bayview. The cemetery keeps records of all headstones, but Sundhausen’s was never recorded and the grave does not appear to ever have had a headstone, she said.
Johnson and her supervisor, Marcia Wazny, did not know why. It’s very unusual, they said, but not unheard of.
“Some families choose not to mark the grave,” Wazny said. “Maybe they got to the point where they had it but never got around to putting it in here.”
That’s plausible, according to one relative.
Theodore and Lila Sundhausen had no children. The rest of his close relatives, including his brother, George, lived near St. Louis, Mo., where they grew up. Their parents had settled there after arriving from Germany in 1904, the same year Theodore Sundhausen was born.
George Sundhausen’s grandson, Ted, 50, said he was named after his uncle Theodore. He was surprised by the strange story and could only speculate as to what had happened.
“Maybe (Lila) thought, ‘Hey, who’s to go see him? Why bother, let’s just keep it on the front porch,’” George Sundhausen said.
That still doesn’t explain how the 250-pound granite slab ended up dumped over Newsome’s fence so far from Bellingham.
Newsome thought she had taken care of it soon after it turned up, and remembers calling a nearby cemetery and giving them the address where they could pick up the headstone.
But new renters moved in, Newsome got busy with her windshield repair supply business, as well as keeping on top of other rental properties she owns, and the headstone was soon forgotten.
Several weeks ago, she came across it again when the renters moved out and was surprised that it was still there. This time, she called the police. And the newspaper.
She was glad to hear that relatives have been found. She said she planned to contact Ted Sundhausen and the Bellingham cemetery to arrange for the headstone to be placed at Theodore Sundhausen’s grave.
The cemetery will require a consensus among the living relatives before that can happen, Johnson said.
“It’s like a mystery almost solved,” Newsome said.
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
Reporters Scott North and Cathy Logg contributed to this story.
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