San Juan Bautista school students play a role in recording history
History courses that come alive seem a natural fit for a school located in a town nicknamed the “City of History.” Thanks to a special project and the creativity of two Anzar High School teachers, students attending the San Juan Bautista school have had the chance to play a role in recording history. The Crossroads History Project, started in 2001, was an attempt by Anzar staff to get students involved and working with all the local historical resources in the area. San Juan Bautista is home to not only the largest of the California Missions but a state historical park, Fremont Peak State Park, the Juan Bautista De Anza National Trail, the recently renovated Castro-Breen Adobe and local cemetery over 150 years old.

It was the cemetery full of uncharted and unmarked graves that ultimately drew the attention of both the teachers and the students.
“The whole thing started by accident,” said Dan Faurot-Daniels, who, along with co-teacher Paul Stampleman, headed the Crossroads project. “We had done a few things with the Historical Society and in Aromas, and then I came across this article in one of the local newspapers titled ‘Grave Confusion,’ highlighting the problem at the cemetery that no one knew exactly where people were buried. We hadn’t even thought of the cemetery before that.”

Students began by making rubbings off of headstones in the cemetery, but quickly graduated to plotting actual grave sites, Faurot-Daniels said. Now nearing completion, the project has lasted nearly four years and involved approximately 75 Anzar students.
“This has been a wonderful project, and we’re just about done,” Faurot-Daniels said.
Using a handwritten ledger of unknown age, Faurot-Daniels, Stampleman and groups of about 10-12 students would make trips to the cemetery twice a week attempting to locate graves and the plot them on a map. An unorganized, outdated record book didn’t help; having cemetery officials find unmarked graves made the job even harder.
“First of all, there was not a map before that had any type of grids so that you could locate things easily,” Faurot-Daniels said. “This handwritten book would say ‘so-and-so is buried in section three, but with no specific direction, and we are talking about very big sections, so one would have to wander about just looking at all the headstones until you found the one you wanted. Another problem that occurred was finding a number of unmarked graves. Workers would be readying a plot for burial that was supposedly empty and find a body there.”
Students would work through sections, transcribing headstones and then plotting the information onto a grid. Even though the work was often difficult, Faurot-Daniels said the students’ interest never wavered.
“It really surprised me at how involved the students became with this,” he said. “It wasn’t a hard sell at all. They definitely took ownership of it; students who were failing other classes did excellent work on this. It really underscored for me the need to get students involved in hands-on learning. It’s been very gratifying.”
The very nature of the project led to more than just learning about maps and grids, however. Faurot-Daniels said many interesting things happened over the four years that taught the student valuable life lessons.
“At one point, a man had written us a letter. He had heard about the project, and he knew that a young family member of his had died in the early 1900s,” he said. “He asked if we could find this person’s burial plot. Well, we found several plots for his family, but at first we couldn’t find the one he was asking about. Then, we found a small plot way in the back that said ‘Baby Fragone.” It was not clear as to why he wasn’t buried with the rest of the family. But the students wrote back and told him what we had found. He was very impressed with how hard the students worked and how they got back to him.”
For Faurot-Daniels, the project took on a more personal meaning - a missing headstone that turned up in the Gilroy cemetery belonged to a relative of his mother-in-law. Thanks to Crossroads, the headstone is now in its proper place.
The finished map will be hung in the San Juan Bautista Historical Society, and small versions will be available at the cemetery. A database with the map has been created, but is not available for public viewing due to concerns about identity theft.
Although a cemetery is not always on a tourist’s list of places to visit, Faurot-Daniels suggests taking the time to check out this one.
“It’s a very interesting cemetery with 150 years of history embedded within it,” he said. “It’s a wonderful place to walk around and reflect on many things. You can see the number of young people who have died, you can trace families, or trace epidemics and see what was killing people at a specific time. And there are no rules at this cemetery about the sizes of the headstones or how you can adorn them. This is a very unique place.”
While the Crossroads History Project was also unique, and well received by the community and the students, the program was recently disbanded due to budget cuts. To finish the project, students have been volunteering their time after school to help plot information. Community members like Georganna Goularte of the SJB Historical Society and parents such as Sheila Prader have also been instrumental in completing the project.
“I wish we had another project like this one. It was a sweeping project, and we learned how to organize something this big that was not made up but extremely authentic,” Faurot-Daniels said. “We got better at it as we went along. This has definitely been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my teaching career.”

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