Lynda Baker's quest to track her family's roots became stymied in an out-of-the-way place: the woodsy north shore of Lake Mille Lacs, 120 miles from her north Minneapolis home.
Descendants of Kentucky slaves, Baker's family was part of a small Black community that settled in Aitkin County's Wealthwood Township in 1898. So she set out with her cousin, Peggy Patterson Carpenter, in 2013 to learn more — and hopefully find their ancestors' long-abandoned cemetery.
"We went up there a few times and drove around and couldn't find it," Baker, 70, recalled during a recent phone call. "We were going in circles, driving all over the place, looking and looking."
Enter the MsStorians, a delightfully named group of middle-aged women who attended First Lutheran Church in nearby Brainerd. "We solve history mysteries and feed our wanderlust," founder Julie Jo Larson said, calling her band "a motley group of women with a passion for history, companionship and adventure."
Larson's quartet of sleuths had explored Brainerd's underground tunnels, its oldest buildings and the area's abandoned mines, writing up articles about their "weekly adventures." They began researching Wealthwood's Black community just as Baker and Carpenter went looking for the cemetery.
Using the FindaGrave website, the MsStorians pinpointed the forgotten cemetery: 12 miles south of Aitkin on Hwy. 169, then 5 miles east on Hwy. 18 along the shore of Mille Lacs and a couple miles northeast.
That's where they found a lone military-issued marble headstone — riddled by vandals' BB pellets — poking out of the weeds. The name on the gravestone belonged to Sgt. Joseph Henry, a Mississippian and member of the 125th U.S. Colored Infantry during the Civil War.
"Chunks of marble were missing from the stone's edges," Larson, 56, wrote in a 2016 article for the Lake Country Journal. "Thankfully, the engraving on the front of the headstone was still legible; the lettering was our first clue into uncovering the names of the Black families who moved to Aitkin County in the fall of 1898."