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• An elderly woman in Okemos, Michigan, moved to a nursing home, and an auction company was hired to clear out her home, MLive.com reported on Sept. 22.
One of the items found by Epic Auctions and Estate Sales' Brad Stoecker was a 5-foot-tall granite headstone with the name Peter J. Weller on the front.
Apparently, the woman's family didn't know the origin of the stone, saying they used the reverse side of it to make fudge.
Stoecker donated the stone to the Friends of Lansing's Historic Cemeteries, but a genealogist was unable to find any surviving family members of Weller, who died in 1849.
However, they did track down his grave, which had been moved in 1875. That's probably when the gravestone was lost, experts believe.
Cemetery preservationists restored the stone to Weller's current resting place and repaired and cleaned those of his family members nearby.y.