Gravemarkers, don't usually get around much, but in the last 115 years three wooden 'tombstones' have made the trip from Calistoga to a barn near Guerneville to an evening on display at the Napa Senior Activities Center and back to Calistoga.

How the ghostly white, hand-hewn markers managed the nearly 100-mile jaunt is, for the most part, a mystery that may never be solved, and that's the fun part -- at least it is for Jeremy Nichols, a retired semi-conductor maker turned, quite unexpectedly he insists, Sonoma County's only bona fide "cemeterian."

Since retiring in 1997, Nichols, has been digging up the past by resurrecting in some cases, the stories of the oft-forgotten cemeteries of Sonoma County. He has also created a first of its kind organization, "Tombstone Amnesty," which is dedicated to returning lost or stolen tombstones to their rightful cemetery.

"We accept, no questions asked, tombstones that someone has at their home or wherever," Nichols said. "If someone has a tombstone because they think it looks nice in their garden, they can keep it, but if they'd like to get rid of it, we will figure where it belongs and return the tombstone."

Tombstone Amnesty is not a police organization, and Nichols will not go around questioning people about the origin of any tombstones they might have.

"We don't want people ratting on their neighbors," he said. "Tombstone Amnesty exists to take in unwanted tombstones, so they're not lost or destroyed forever."

On Thursday, Nichols shared the organization's first success -- the return of three wooden gravemarkers to what might be termed their final resting place, Calistoga -- with about three dozen people at a meeting of the Napa Valley Genealogical & Biographical Society.

"I don't know how (the gravemarkers) came to be stored in a barn near Guerneville, and that's something we may never know," Nichols said. "If you let your imagination run wild you can come up with all kinds of ideas, but it doesn't feel right to suspect that they were ever stolen."

The whitewashed, but otherwise unscarred "tombstones," as they are usually called, presumably started their journey about 115 years ago, at the head of the graves of Heinrich, Maria and Paul Munk, who, according to the dates on the pale markers, died in 1885, 1887 and 1891 respectively.

But you can't believe everything you read.

"Maria actually died in 1897," said Arlene Pettet, of Calistoga, the great granddaughter of Christopher Klotz, Maria's brother. "This whole thing is really exciting for me, no matter how the markers got to where they are today."

The markers were discovered in a barn on land once part of a farm owned by the Ridenour family along the Russian River, according to Nichols. A Ridenour family member passed the markers along to historian and retired Sonoma County Deputy Sheriff John Schubert, who is member of the Board of the Sonoma County Historical Society.

"He passed them along to me," Nichols said. "It was after some research that I was able to learn that they would likely belonged in the Pioneer Cemetery in Calistoga."

According to Arlene, who has known about the Munk family long before the markers turned up, Heinrich and Maria Followed Heinrich's brother to Calistoga in the early 1870s from their home near Stuttgart, Germany, with their nine children, the youngest of which was born in the early 1870s.

"They were farmers, and had a vineyard in Calistoga's Teale Canyon, but I don't know how large it was," Pettet said.

She knows little about Heinrich's life or death, was only that he was 53 when he'd passed. A few years later their son, Paul was killed in an accident on the farm at age 24.

"He and a Chinaman, according to an old newspaper article, were attempting to load a third puncheon (A cask containing sometimes 84, sometimes 120, gallons) of wine onto a wagon," Pettet recalled. "Attempting to put the wagon a little lower to make the loading easier, he moved to the head of the horses. He lost control of the horses, who were apparently unable to hold the estimated 33,000-pound load."

The article described the accident, that Paul's head was trampled by the horses, and that a wheel "had passed from his right hip across his chest," crushing him.

"The last thing he said to the Chinaman before he died was 'go for the doctor,'" said Pettet. "A juried inquest was held after the coroner arrived on the train from Napa, and his death was ruled accidental. I guess they didn't take anybody's word for it."

"The story of these tombstones isn't over by any means," said Nichols.

"It's going to take a some more research to find out why they were in Guerneville. It could be that they were never in the ground, or that they were all created about the same time by some family member who decided they didn't like them and decided to go with a stone monument instead. The possibilities are what make this so exciting."