Aberdeen’s Graveyard Girl

By Bernie Hunhoff

Tasha Tietz, like all nurses, has a caring soul. She believes people should be remembered even after they're gone.

Walk through a cemetery with Tasha Westby Tietz and you soon learn that tombstones represent life.

The same happens when you visit Tietz’s Facebook page. Watch her YouTube channel. Catch one of her talks or peruse her research on websites like Find a Grave and Ancestry.com. Tietz considers herself “a loner,” but the vivacious Aberdeen nurse is quickly becoming recognized as an authority on cemeteries. She even has an online persona, “Graveyard Girl,” though she shares the moniker with a rap musician and a fashion and beauty YouTuber — interesting company for the introverted daughter of an Aberdeen bricklayer and a beautician.

“I couldn’t even speak at my own wedding,” she laughs, “but I just spoke at the genealogy society and at the Aberdeen library. I can’t believe all that is happening.”

Tietz’s interest in the deceased began when she was working as a nurse’s aide at Mother Joseph Manor, an Aberdeen nursing home. She soon grew to love the Presentation sisters, and she worried that they might be forgotten when they die because they don’t have children and spouses. Even to this day, one of her favorite cemetery walks is a section of Sacred Heart Cemetery in Aberdeen devoted to deceased Presentations.

But it wasn’t long before she took an interest in more grave sites: those of other patients at the nursing home, her own ancestors and eventually perfect strangers.

“There is a quote that says a person is truly forgotten when their name is spoken for the last time,” she says. “That makes me believe that every person should be remembered and one way to do that is to be sure they have a tombstone.”

And in today’s online world, every tombstone should be searchable. Seven years ago, she began to enter tombstone photos on Find a Grave; today she is among its busiest contributors. She has posted more than 2,400 memorials and obituaries and 5,000 photos.

Aberdeen’s four cemeteries are her favorite places. She has documented many of their markers on Find a Grave.

Her paternal ancestors are buried at Claire City and Sisseton, so she has also visited them for years. “I try to take a bouquet to all my direct grandparents on Memorial Day,” she says. “I like to go to Claire City in September and visit the graves at Sica Hollow.”

In 2021, she found three tombstones of the Roy family, some of the first white settlers, among the autumn foliage of Sica Hollow. Most of her explorations have been in northeast South Dakota, but she has also roamed cemeteries as far away as Washington, D.C., Canada, Arizona and Texas.

She includes “graving trips” on family vacations when her husband, John, and their three daughters — Chloe, Claire and Charlotte — are willing. “The girls are not super-impressed yet,” she says. “John is also not a fan, but he’ll take me. We went to the Black Hills last summer and we explored Mountain View Cemetery at Keystone. I picked it because some of the Mount Rushmore carvers are buried there, and the actor Bobby Buntrock died and was buried there. There is also a Native leader, a medicine man, an artist and some kind of a wild Old West guy. It’s the only cemetery with a view of Mount Rushmore.”

She recently visited the De Smet cemetery where Charles and Caroline Ingalls are buried, along with their daughters Mary, Grace and Carrie.

Her social media posts also include information she gathers from other sources, including a recent bit about the Jewish custom of placing stones rather than flowers on tombstones. She also spotlighted a report of an Iowa cemetery that features three pyramids, built by the local newspaper editor who planned to be buried in one of them.

Graveyard Girl’s Facebook page now has more than 6,000 followers. Her sites have grown so much that they earn her small amounts of money, some of which she has used to help pay for gravestones on unmarked graves. If the revenues continue to grow, she plans to also invest in camera equipment and research materials for the ever-growing avocation.

She finds genealogy research the most rewarding aspect of being Graveyard Girl. People from across the nation have sent her notes of appreciation for her assistance in finding the graves of their ancestors.

Still, her favorite part of being Graveyard Girl is the time spent in cemeteries. “I like to be out in nature, and I am pretty much a loner. I think I’m also an old soul. I’m happiest when I’m with my family, outdoors in a beautiful cemetery.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.