“Amy Larner Giroux has been drawn to the mysteries of cemeteries since she was 16, when she would go to graves with a box of matches to light her way, writing down the names of the dead and putting them in a coffee can,” reports Hometown Life.
Now, she’s working with a team of UCF researchers, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, the National Park Service, the Florida National Guard and Flagler College to uncover the experiences and identities of imprisoned Native American warriors.
“There are always questions in a cemetery, there’s always a headstone that says ‘Research me, find out who I am,'” she said. “Those are the rabbit holes I go down. I try to give people back their names.”
After several years of research and digging through old records, Giroux discovered the names of chiefs and warriors from the Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche tribes who were imprisoned and died at Fort Marion, now the Castillo de San Marcos.
It is her hope that the information she has found can help give the descendants of the prisoners closure about what happened to their kin.