Tireless Genealogist Who Revered The Dead Dies

Judy Olsen, an author and genealogy researcher, used to call dead people whose records were missing "her people." She refused to let them rest in obscurity. Once she was given a name, she would scour cemeteries, pore over yellowed records, and search the Web into the wee hours until she found a scintilla of information about that person's life. I interviewed Olsen in a Pemberton cemetery in 2005 and watched in awe as she recounted snippets of the lives of the people buried there. She died last week at age 69 - but the stories she uncovered will live on.