Their names, written in John Goegel’s angular script, form tight rows of capital letters like a precision font: Benjamin and Joseph Sanborn, both veterans of the War of 1812. Peter Ayres, a teenage soldier in the American Revolution.

In some cases, Goegel knows only the branch of the military in which they served and a few vital dates. In others, after nearly a decade of research as chairman of Canterbury’s cemetery trustees, he can recite from memory their stories of battle-tested heroism.

Frank Pickard, Goegel explained, weaving through obelisks and memorial stones at Canterbury Center Cemetery, was one of an estimated 100,000 Union soldiers younger than 15. Military records show he enlisted at age 18, but Pickard’s birth certificate contradicts that. Asa Foster enlisted in the Continental Army and was a member of Benedict Arnold’s staff – reportedly his bodyguard – when the now-infamous military general defected to the British army.

“It could be just anecdotal, something somebody passed down,” he said of Foster’s tale. “It’s a fun story and we’ll stick to it.”

Whether Goegel knows a lot or very little about each of the 185 veterans buried in Canterbury’s 34 cemeteries, he has ensured their names are remembered, their military service is recorded and American flags are planted in the ground beside their graves.

He has kept track of every veteran interred in town since 2016, when he read the last headstone in Canterbury’s Maple Grove Cemetery and recorded it as part of the town’s Military Veterans’ Project. With help from cemetery historian Mark Stevens, Goegel has learned veterans’ individual histories and plotted their graves on hand-drawn maps.

Nine years later, he hopes to issue a third edition of the Veterans’ Project, updated with new names he has, until now, kept penciled in the project margins – some freshly discovered, others belonging to veterans who died recently.

“It’s just honoring veterans and not forgetting their service,” he said, sitting under the shade of the town’s gazebo. “Maybe it’s a way of honoring my father who served, too, and honoring my grandfather, who served in World War I. That was important for me.”

Examining history

Sampson Battis’s weathered headstone, splattered with overgrown lichen, stands alone in a small alcove at the Canterbury Center Cemetery. A Black man who fought in the Revolutionary War, Battis is buried with his wife and only companion over a mossy slope, apart from the other dead. An inconspicuous rock marks her grave; an American flag and a bundle of pink and white artificial roses mark his.

Much of what’s known about Battis – that his enslaver, a colonel in the war, gave him 100 acres along with his freedom and that he later lived to be 95 –comes from one book: James Lyford’s “History of the town of Canterbury, New Hampshire,” an encyclopedia of the town’s genealogy before 1912.

Lyford, a man rumored to have never stepped foot in town, documented in the same anthology hundreds of lesser-known personal histories nearly lost to time.

His book has been Goegel’s most trusted resource for years.

“Without that it would’ve been impossible. I had some other sources, but 99% of it was from the town history and 1% came from other sources,” he said. “And there aren’t that many copies out there.”

Goegel was receiving cancer treatment in 2016 when he began perusing Lyford’s book, searching at first for a simple distraction. His reading turned methodical as he began making note of people who had served in the military and setting off to look for their final resting places in town.

“It turned out to be a fool’s errand,” he recalled.

Many of the servicemen listed in the book had eventually left town and been buried elsewhere. And two towns initially incorporated as part of Canterbury – Loudon and Northfield – had become independent municipalities in the late-1700s, taking with them many pre-Revolutionary War veterans whose stories Lyford still recorded in his book.

On cemetery grounds another challenge presented itself.

An American flag planted beside a headstone typically indicates a person served in the military. In Canterbury’s oldest cemeteries, where flags had withstood decades of vicious winters, many were destroyed or missing. Town crews responsible for cemetery landscaping may have mowed over some flags, Goegel speculated, and to further complicate matters, some graves marked with American flags belonged to people with no record of service.

It would take Goegel a year to cross reference the veterans recorded in Lyford’s History with the marked graves across Canterbury’s 34 cemeteries, and on July 4, 2017, the town’s cemetery trustees and historian published the first edition of the Military Veterans’ Project booklet.

In the past, only 67 veterans had been recognized. By the time the first edition was issued, Goegel and his colleagues had identified 159 veterans and ensured that all their graves were marked with a flag. Now, they recognize 185 in total.

“A true historian probably would not call what I do research, since it’s there in black and white staring at me,” he insisted. “But being a veteran myself, I felt that I owed it to those people in town.”

‘Real heroes’

On occasion, Stevens, the cemetery historian, hears from Battis’s descendants, who come from as near as Loudon and as far as Ohio, Missouri and Alabama to read the file he keeps on Battis’s life and to pay their respects. Actors in cemetery history walks will contact Stevens for information about the figures they portray, like Dr. Joseph Harper or the wife of notorious serial killer H.H. Holmes, both of whom are buried in Canterbury.

“They’ll say, ‘Who have you got that fits this theme? We’re doing murderers’ or, ‘We’re doing veterans,’” he said.

When Stevens sought to know more about the abundance of rich history in his small town he visited those who had experienced it during World War II. There was Harry Lamprey, who had been a combat medic in the South Pacific. Lamprey remembered the visceral emotion of saying goodbye to his mother before boarding a train and leaving town for a military physical in Manchester.

“When he got on the train here in Canterbury he didn’t know whether he was coming home in a few hours, a few days, a few weeks or never again,” Stevens recounted.

Then, there was the prisoner of war who gave Stevens the journal he had kept during his time in captivity. Whenever Stevens’s wife, a nurse, worked Wednesday night shifts, he would visit the veteran and eat dinner with him. He hears from one of the late veteran’s sons every Wednesday evening.

The oral histories Stevens aggregated became a supplementary resource for Goegel in his research.

“Mark and I know real heroes,” Goegel said. “The people that really need to be recognized are the veterans.”

Goegel and Stevens expect to release the third edition of the Military Veterans’ Project by the end of the summer.

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com