EXCLUSIVE
For most of her life, Lulu Francois believed her family history was a mystery lost to time.
That changed when, during a Christmas gathering seven years ago, an aunt revealed she sometimes visited a small, unkempt cemetery in Comal County. There, migrants of Mexican descent are buried on a German ranch — including Francois’ great-grandmother, Paula Ribera, and her infant grandson, Marcello.
Francois was shocked: She grew up in a tight-knit family in San Antonio. “My aunts and uncles were always very close,” Francois told The Barbed Wire, tucking her short dark hair behind her ear. As a child, she visited her grandparents’ house every Sunday in the country near Boerne, where she and her cousins chased grasshoppers in the fields.
“We always grew up saying ‘There are 14 kids in my mom’s family,’ nine girls and five boys, and then you’re telling me there was another child that was born?” Francois recalled. “We actually had another uncle who died as a baby?”
The discovery sparked a sense of duty to find out what happened to them — and to preserve their memories.
“I don’t want them thinking that we’ve forgotten them,” Francois said. “All these years that they were there, and we didn’t know about them.”
The successful 63-year-old tech marketing expert started with a Google search. She found her great-grandmother’s burial site on Find A Grave, which had photos of her headstone and an excerpt from a local history book indicating Paula Ribera had drowned in 1918 after falling from a wagon while crossing a river. Francois’ family believed she was actually run over by a wagon. The site also mentioned her infant grandson, Marcello, but had no cause of death for the baby.
Francois wanted more information. And she wanted to see their graves for herself.
She didn’t expect that desire to devolve into a battle over the right to remember her own family, suspicions of bulldozed graves, or a quagmire of latent accountability. In fact, as she looked at each new detail of her family history, her experience raised more questions than it answered: Who gets to honor their ancestors on their own time — and who must ask for permission to visit their family burial lands? Who should be held accountable if graves are destroyed? And who gets to decide what people’s history is memorialized and whose is erased?
***
Francois soon got some answers. Her ancestors are buried on a site called “Mexican Cemetery #2,” and it’s on land that is privately owned.
Instead of being able to pay respect any time she wants, or even during set hours, the cemetery’s location means that in order for Francois to visit, she must ask the landowners for permission.
All cemeteries — including a single grave — are protected under the Texas Health and Safety Code. And, under the law, any person who wants to visit a cemetery on private land must be granted access as long as the two parties agree to “reasonable” times and the visiting party gives at least a 14-day notice.
However, no state agency enforces the access portion of the law. Until 2019, the Texas Funeral Service Commission oversaw access issues. But the Sunset Advisory Commission, which periodically evaluates state agencies to determine if funding is well spent, recommended in a 2018 report that the regulation was “an unusual and unwarranted use of state resources,” and the Legislature voted to eliminate it. The Texas Historical Commission fired back on its website: “Unfortunately, this will put the burden (and cost, if not worked out civilly) directly on the descendants.”
Denying access can constitute a Class C misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fee, though it’s up to individuals to report violations. The Texas Historic Commission, which keeps track of cemeteries in the state, provides guidance for families seeking permission to visit.
“Access now falls into the hands of descendants and landowners, solely,” the commission website states. “If the two parties cannot come to an agreement, legal counsel will be necessary.”
In 2018, Francois contacted the property owners, but after failed attempts to schedule a visit, she almost gave up. Time passed, there was a global pandemic, and she decided to reach back out again in the summer of 2023. She had no luck, again. By the fall, Francois started a process the historic commission provided for her.
Surveyors who documented the cemetery in the 1980s called it “Unnamed Mexican Cemetery.” It’s unclear how it became #2, though public records show it rests on land owned by Dr. Craig Elbel and Dr. Leslie Degen, who run a 1,240-acre ranch and Bulverde Bexar Veterinary Clinic off Highway 46 in the 250-person town of Spring Branch, about 40 miles due north of San Antonio. The Elbel family has reportedly lived on the land since the mid-1800s. Neither Elbel nor Degen responded to multiple requests for comment — via email, phone, or social media — by The Barbed Wire for this story.
At first, Francois tried showing up at the Elbel family vet clinic, five miles away from their ranch. But she said she was told by Dr. Degen, there was no one available to escort her to where her family is buried. Then, she wrote a few official letters to the Elbel family. She didn’t hear back. But, armed with the knowledge she had a legal right to visit the cemetery, she told The Barbed Wire: “I wasn’t giving up.”
Francois’ case isn’t rare: The Texas Historical Commission acknowledges 14,000 cemeteries on private lands, and that number is growing. And because Texas has a history of segregation, Black or Latino people were often buried separately from white people. Even 70 years after the official end of segregation, that means Black and Latino Texans are more likely to be cut off from their ancestors and left to fight for access to their own history. In fact, it’s become a common fight for preservationists, historians, and descendants to make sure that Black and Latino Texans’ existence on these lands is preserved accurately.
“This is the fight that I fight with every site,” Diana Hernández, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who founded the (Re)claiming Memories lab, told The Barbed Wire. Hernández is currently working on similar cases regarding at least four other burial sites in Texas involving similar dynamics, she said. Through her lab, Hernández helps connect Black, Indigenous and People of Color, Queer and other marginalized communities to their ancestry. The lab’s efforts restore “missing and forgotten histories,” but it also advocates for the historic preservation of communities, sacred spaces, and sites of significance, according to its website.
When the Elbels didn’t respond to her letters, Francois contacted the Comal County Sheriff’s Office as a last resort. Before she filed a formal report, she finally got an email from Dr. Degen.
Greetings from the Elbel Ranch,
This is Dr. Degen and I manage the trusts for the Elbel Ranch in Spring Branch, Texas. I understand you would like to visit Mexican Cemetery No. 2. I believe I was the one that escorted your party the last several times you visited. Since a member of your party fell down during your last visit, I would need a hold harmless agreement signed and notarized by those wanting to visit our property. If you will send me the names, addresses, and date of birth of each member of your party who would like to visit, I can get the hold harmless agreement drawn up and send it to you to start getting it notarized. I am available to take you to the cemetery on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 4 pm until dark. I am not available on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday. If it is raining, the roads leading toward the cemetery become muddy and require a 4-wheel drive vehicle. In an effort to avoid some of the problems we had on your last visit, we ask all members of your party to abide by some simple rules this time including, wearing proper attire (long pants and closed toed shoes), no firearms, no defacing, scraping or modifying the headstones, and no trash or other objects can be left behind, Just as a reminder, this area of the ranch is very primitive. The cemetery is located on a gravely hillside with vegetation including mesquite with thorns, cedar, and prickly pear cactus. It is outside so it is not really handicap accessible. No bathrooms are available. Those wanting to visit should be able to walk approximately 50 feet on uneven land to see the graves. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Leslie Degen
Elbel Ranch Managing Partner
Francois responded that there must be some confusion, since she’d never met the Elbels or visited the site before. Francois asked her aunts about the fall and the guns, but they told her they didn’t even own guns. She did acknowledge the previous visits her aunt had made, as she’d been informed at that Christmas seven years ago — but no one seemed to know what fall Dr. Degen was referring to. Still, Francois obliged Degen’s request and sent a list of people who’d be visiting along with their addresses and dates of birth.
Six years after learning about her grandmother’s burial site, following repeated efforts and a nudge from local law enforcement to the Elbel family on her behalf, Francois finally made the trip to visit her ancestors. It was the day after Thanksgiving in 2023, Nov. 24, when she got her first view of “Mexican Cemetery #2” with her dad, her aunt, her brother, and her sister-in-law.
That day, the Elbel family were “as nice as they could be,” said Francois — despite the fact that “they had basically ignored me or given me a hard time prior to that.” The family had a “nice, long visit” with Elbel, Degen, and their two boys, said Francois. (Though neither Degen nor Elbel replied to multiple requests for comment from The Barbed Wire, their eldest adult son acknowledged receipt, thanked us for our interest, and forwarded our inquiry to the property’s managing partner.)
You wouldn’t know the cemetery was there unless you stumbled upon it.
It’s tucked near the banks of the Guadalupe River. A handful of gray, discolored headstones peek out from fallen trees, and oaks hover above the green grass where spotted deer roam.
“The headstones are not in good shape,” Francois told The Barbed Wire. “They need to be cleaned.” But when she asked if she could clean them, Francois said the Elbels told her she could only touch her great-grandmothers’ headstone — none of the others.
“They view that cemetery as their cemetery,” said Francois. “That’s why they felt that they could tell me that, ‘You can clean your grandmother’s headstone, but you can’t clean any of the other headstones.’”
There was a slight breeze, and the air cooled as the sun set around 5:30 p.m. that day. Before it was time to leave, they took a group picture. Her aunt looked over at the graves one more time, towards the other side of the Elbel ranch, past some loose barbed wire denoting the property line.
Across that barbed wire was River Park, part of a neighborhood that began development in the late 1990s on the property adjacent to the Elbel’s. Francois’ aunt looked at her and said it appeared as if some headstones were missing from the other side of the property line. “‘I remember that there were more. I don’t know what happened, but there were more,’” she said.
The cemetery sits right on the property line. Today, no gravestones or burial markers exist on the River Park side — but Francois said even Dr. Elbel’s son mentioned there “were additional headstones” there in years past.
It was yet another thread that led to more questions.
“If this is cemetery number two, where’s cemetery number one?” Francois asked.
***
It turns out, it was on the other side of the property line.
After that first visit, Francois was left to wonder: Could she have more family buried in the area? What about her great-grandfather? “Maybe we could find a name on one of the other headstones,” Francois said. Could the answers lie on the other side of the fence in “Mexican Cemetery #1”?
Francois knew she would need help from experts, so she contacted Hernández, the historic preservationist and doctoral student, in early November 2023. By this point, Francois still wanted to know what happened to her own family members in Cemetery #2, but she also wanted to find out what happened to those now-gone gravestones across the property line: “I would like to identify where those bodies are and do something” to memorialize them — maybe even find and notify their descendants.
It was Hernández who told Francois that stories like hers — in which primarily Black and Brown Texans must piece together clues at the whims of private property owners who have not made an effort to preserve burial sites — are common. Hernández has been working with families like Francois’ to battle private property owners for more than a decade, she told her. There’s a direct line between Texas’ history of segregation and what families like Francois’ experience. Hernández’ research — and stories like Francois’ — show that, while segregation was overturned in 1954, there’s still a divide some 70 years later between which Texas families can and cannot protect their own ancestors’ burial sites, let alone learn their family histories.
“They’re indifferent,” Hernández said, of the — mostly white — property owners. “They’re indifferent to the people that are buried there. They’re indifferent to the history. They’re indifferent to the community that that history belongs to because they don’t see it as theirs. It’s an us-and-them mentality.” Property owners “do understand that cemeteries are historic,” said Hernández, adding: “They may not see them as sacred, but they have to accept that they deserve some degree of respect. Because they’re cemeteries.”
It’s hard to document “histories that are associated with trauma in racism and historical racial violence,” said Hernández. “It never gets easier.”
Tracing the history of “Mexican Cemetery #1” and “Mexican Cemetery #2,” why they were separated, and who is responsible for their upkeep — or desecration — is a fraught exercise. It’s also one that’s indicative of the many barriers Black and Brown Texans may face in the course of simply trying to visit the remains of their ancestors.
The land we know as Texas today originally belonged to Mexicans who won their independence from Spain in 1821. In an 1846 Land Grant Map of Comal County are two crosses on a property under the name Elias Flint. It’s unclear what Flint’s relationship was to the Elbels, but in current tax records, the name E. Flint still shows up in the legal property descriptions. The crosses indicate one cemetery on the banks of the river. The other is the Elbel family’s, named the Beierle Family Cemetery. Incidentally, 1846 is the same year that the Mexican War was in full swing. Two years later, the United States acquired Texas, including Comal County. This area is one of several where Mexican Americans say the border crossed them.
The Comal County Historical Commission has surveyed and mapped the area, but Cindy Coers, chair of the commission, told The Barbed Wire she’s not sure when or why Mexican Cemetery #1 and #2 were split — or if they were always separate.
Hernández found an old copy of a Comal County Texas State Highway Department map that shows the cemetery split by a road that’s no longer there, leading her to theorize the cemeteries were divided as early as 1964. Amy Goldstein, an archeologist who’s worked with Hernández for the past three years, found two aerial photographs of the area taken in 1963 and 1973, she told The Barbed Wire.
And though there are only four headstones in Mexican Cemetery # 2 today, and none left across the property line on Mexican Cemetery #1, Goldstein believes there could be up to 30 people buried on both sites based on the size of the area and the patterns of the vegetation.
“You have this pretty well defined rectangle,” Goldstein said.
The aerial photos seem like a blur of trees to the untrained eye, but Goldstein said, combined with the context and Hernández’s research, the fence lines in both images show a “tailored landscape” and are “a really obvious indicator” for the presence of a cemetery, its size — and the number of likely occupants.
That same number offered by Goldstein was separately posited by Hernández: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we were looking at 30 to 50 (graves) on each side. The property is pretty big,” she estimated.
Today, one side of the cemetery, #2, is on the Elbel family ranch and the other side, #1, is part of the River Crossing Property Owner’s Association. The association’s community website contends the land was “directly the result of the hard-working, resourceful, and sturdy settlers who arrived in Texas soil from Germany in the mid-1800s.” Dates detailing the various families that owned the land go back at least 200 years ago to 1824, according to the website.
Cindy Coers, the Comal County Historical Commission chair, told Francois that “when they built that park, the developer bulldozed a bunch of headstones on that side of the fence.”
Francois said, “I didn’t think you could do that.”
And she’s right: It’s illegal to damage graves. Remains can’t be removed without approval from district courts. If headstones were bulldozed to make way for a park, it could be a violation of Texas Penal Code Section 42.08 (Abuse of Corpse), which is a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $4,000 and no more than a year in jail. If “damage or destruction is inflicted on a place of worship or human burial” it could also be a violation of Texas Penal Code Section 28.03 (Criminal Mischief), a state jail felony punishable by up to 99 years or less than 5 years in prison and a fine up to $10,000. The Texas Historical Commission recommends developers locate “all graves prior to the planning of any new construction or earthmoving as it is very common for graves to extend beyond a fence and/or beyond the visible grave markers.”
Coers, who’s been with the commission for 11 years, told The Barbed Wire she believed what she told Francois — and said she’d heard about the missing headstones from a historical group who’d conducted a survey of the area in the ‘80s. But Coers said she hadn’t “really been able to verify” the claim.
“They were told that there had been some stones there, but it had disappeared, or you know, could it have possibly been, maybe dirt put over it at such time?” Coers said.
Goldstein told The Barbed Wire that there’s no law on Texas books that would require anyone to do an archeological survey before development unless they meet certain criteria, like getting funding from the state for the project, federal funding, or if the government owns the land. The Council of Texas Archeologists has a list of guidelines that must be followed specifically for historic cemeteries and unmarked historic graves. “It should be assumed that unmarked graves may be present in every historic cemetery, both within and beyond its known boundaries,” the council’s guidelines say.
According to state documents, in January 2000, the River Crossing Property Owner’s Association assumed ownership and management of the common areas at River Crossing, including the parks where Mexican Cemetery #1 lies. A deed was filed in 2004 for Sutherland RCR Venture LTD, the developer behind the neighborhood, which was owned by the late Charles Patterson and his son Jay, who is now the owner and a partner at the company.
When reached by phone, Jay Patterson told The Barbed Wire the company started the subdivision in 1998 when he was still in sales, so he wasn’t privy to what happened to those missing gravestones.
“I don’t have any recollection of the cemetery being on the property,” Patterson said.
When asked if he’d be surprised to learn there was a cemetery on his property, Patterson said, “Yes, because I’m not aware of one,” he told The Barbed Wire. “Or have ever been aware of one.” When asked if anyone with Sutherland Communities would have known that there was a cemetery on the property, he responded: “I can assure you not.”
When asked who would have known, Patterson pointed to The River Crossing Property Owner’s Association. The board president, Brad Candia, told The Barbed Wire via email that until we inquired, he only knew about one cemetery on the Elbel family ranch; he was not familiar with the cemetery in their park “and have not seen anything myself out there.”
However, Rod Young, who lives in the neighborhood, said in an email to The Barbed Wire that Mexican Cemetery #1, as it’s known today, was described in a 1989 Comal County Genealogy Society booklet called “Lest We Forget” — a full ten years before River Crossing started its build out. Young said it’s listed on page 127 as ‘Un-Named Mexican Cemetery.’ The page indicated that “up to about 10 graves once existed here, although only three or four were obvious and inventoried in the 1980s,” Young wrote. By 2024, there were only four remaining gravestones in Mexican Cemetery #2 and none left across the property line.
The book, according to Young, also mentions the location as “being on a terrace of the Guadalupe River,” which is “subject to flooding.” He added: “Some grave markers had been washed away.”
But even if the river caused some damage to the site, part of the area was cleared to make way for River Park, which is a private amenity exclusively for the people who live at River Crossing. Candia told The Barbed Wire he didn’t know what year the park was built.
It may never be clear whether gravestones were bulldozed by developers, inadvertently destroyed, or simply washed away by the river. But, now that Hernández and Goldstein had become involved, it might be possible to learn how many had once been present.
“In a situation like this one where the property owners are not the descendants of the people buried,” Hernández continued, “They may or may not take care of it, and they may or may not care what happens to it.”
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Hernández began what she calls “death work” in 2013 after she noticed a cemetery in her neighborhood in Missouri City was demolished and built over. It piqued her curiosity.
“An elder that lived nearby informed me that it was an enslaved people’s cemetery,” Hernandez told The Barbed Wire via text. “The utter disrespect for the site and the souls buried there lit a fire in me to start to document other cemeteries that were unmarked like this one.”
She tried learning more about that site, but came up empty handed, she said. Most of the history was preserved only through word of mouth. “Death work” became a hobby that consumed her outside of work hours.
Hernández visited the burial grounds at Mexican Cemetery #1 with Francois in March, thanks to a neighbor who let them into the park, where Hernández said signs pointed to far more than 10 original graves. “There’s odd placement of stones, odd placement of trees,” she said. “During my time working with cemeteries, I’ve come to learn about specific markers of burials.”
There’s also evidence of “ground depressions” that could indicate additional graves, she added, but ground-penetrating radar — or other evidence — would be necessary to know for sure.
“It would be great if we could help identify who those people are as well and maybe identify their descendants, because I’m sure their descendants don’t know they’re there,” Francois said. In fact, Hernández has a team ready to start light surface excavations and use ground penetrating radar to see the size and scope of the burial site.
(Editor’s note: After this story published, Candia — the board president of the property owner’s association — wrote a statement seeking to clarify that Francois only requested access to the park in order to visit Cemetery #2 and never specified that she was investigating “the claim of a cemetery on our land.” He added that her request was declined, and “it was recommended to Ms. Francois that she work with the land owner to obtain access to their land from the public side of the road” for that purpose, since Francois is not a resident and the property owner’s association is an “uninvolved third party” in the dispute over access to Cemetery #2. Candia wrote that, when reached by The Barbed Wire, he “provided as much information” as he could find about the park’s history and helped connect us to a resident with more knowledge.
He added, in reference to Cemetery #1, that he frequently is out on the property with his dogs and reiterated that he was “unaware of any cemetery.” Candia wrote: “The River Park is a natural piece of land that is mostly unimproved land. The only area that has been built on is the upper portion where a pavilion and restroom are placed. The majority of the park, to include the location near where the purported cemetery is located, is natural and when compared to old aerial photos can be seen to have the same trees and no evidence of bulldozing. If anyone presents the POA with more solid information proving the existence of a cemetery on POA property, we are more than happy to work the the appropriate parties to provide access and ensure the proper attention can be paid to any such location on our land.”)
Until the Elbels, or the River Crossing Property Owner’s Association, allow greater access, Hernández’s search for records and survey of the land will have to suffice. Based on multiple accounts of missing headstones — from Francois’ aunt, the Elbels’ son, the entry in Young’s pamphlet, and Coers — and what she herself observed, Hernández estimated there could be dozens of bodies buried underneath the grounds. Without Francois’ persistence and Hernández’s research, those dozens of potential lives would have remained undiscovered.
For now, they still remain unconfirmed.
“We know that (the Elbels) had Mexican migrants working for them, and that they were being buried there whenever they died on their site,” Hernández said. “We’d have to see more documents to see how many workers they were having at a time back when it was a working farm and they had a full workforce.”
In the meantime, Hernández has continued to dig through what she does have available to her through libraries and state and national archives. Hernández has, so far, found several legal documents that might have belonged to Francois’ ancestors.
An El Paso border crossing identification card issued by the Holly Sugar Company in Colorado, dated June 21, 1917, matches Francois’ great-grandmother’s married name, “Paula Valdez,” and is consistent with the years she would have been married, alive, and living in Texas. Hernández said the sugar company had a production facility in Texas and they heavily recruited Mexican laborers from Texas.
The woman photographed in the document, Paula Valdez, has dark hair, thick lips, and a strong nose. The ID listed her height at 5’2” and, under “physical peculiarities,” it said the woman had a “pit scar” on the left side of her face. Valdez is listed as a citizen of Mexico, like Ribera was. The card describes Valdez as an “alien” and grants her permission to temporarily enter the United States “solely for the purpose of engaging in agricultural pursuits.” The back notes that “engagement in labor of any other character” would deem Valdez “liable to deportation.” Hernández also found several border crossing cards with the name “Paula Valdez,” which showed she moved back and forth between Central Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila. Francois’ great-grandmother would have been born around 1866, making her 51 years old in 1917. Though there is no age listed on the border crossing identification card, it’s certainly feasible that the woman in the photograph is 51. Hernández has tried multiple times to find a death certificate for Francois’ great-grandmother, but she has come up empty. A lack of death documentation is not uncommon for poor, transient Mexican migrant workers, Hernández told The Barbed Wire.
The documents are consistent with the facts that Francois and her family know of their great-grandmother’s life, but they had never seen an image of her and so cannot be entirely certain of the match.
Hernández also found a death certificate for two of Paula’s sons, including Ciriaco Valdez, who was born August 8, 1887 and died June 20, 1973 at 85 years old from septic shock, with hepatitis listed as a significant condition contributing to the death. Valdez was a laborer on a farm, and his race was listed as “white.” Hernández said she found paperwork that showed Ciriaco enlisted in both World Wars, but, as of press time, she wasn’t yet sure if he served abroad. Another son, Pedro Valdez, was born January 21, 1897. He was about 10 years younger than Ciriaco, and he died in San Antonio just a month before his 51st birthday. His cause of death was listed as an “accidental death, shot by a falling gun,” according to the records found by Hernández. His trade was listed as a “watchman.” He was listed as a son of Teodoro Valdez and Paula Ribero, like his brother. (There are differences in the surname spellings, which researchers say was not uncommon given language barriers and different levels of literacy, as well as the literacy of whomever was recording the data.)
Francois told The Barbed Wire that she believes her great-grandmother’s spirit has kept her called to this research. And though she’s learned a lot about her ancestors in the past few years, she still hopes to be allowed to maintain her great-grandmother’s cemetery. In fact, she’d like to rename it to something less — in her words — degrading. “There are people here, and you can’t really tell who they are because they haven’t been taken care of,” she said. “Instead of calling it Mexican Cemetery #2, maybe we can call it Paula’s Cemetery.”
***
Since she learned about the graves seven years ago, Francois has only visited Mexican Cemetery #2 twice.
“I literally have five aunts and uncles left, and they’re all in their late 70s,” Francois said. Another aunt died as The Barbed Wire was working on the story in late October. “It was just another poignant reminder that we need to get as much information from the people that remember anything as much as possible before they’re all gone.”
Francois felt hopeful after the Elbels suggested, six months ago, building a fence so her family could access her great-grandmother’s cemetery without having to get permission to go through the ranch. They could get a code to access the land through the adjacent private neighborhood park, the Elbels had suggested. But then the property owner’s association told Francois that it would be a liability.
No gate has been built.
Francois’ hope was to continue researching the reports of missing headstones and determine if there were more people buried alongside her great grandmother and uncle.
But that research can’t happen without access.
When The Barbed Wire reached out to the Texas Historical Commission’s cemetery preservation program to learn how families like Francois’ can manage this system, program’s coordinator, Jenny McWilliams, provided guidance — in the form of a copy of the legal statutes — and disputed the characterization of the cemeteries as having been lost to time or ignored.
“Mexican Cemetery #2 is not forgotten,” McWilliams wrote in an email. “The landowner and the County Historical Commission are aware of the cemetery. I understand that it is physically difficult to access due to ranch roads, but the landowners do provide access.”
“Forgotten” or not, Mexican Cemetery #1 and #2 were unnamed for a long time. In contrast, the Elbel’s family German cemetery is well documented. The Beierle Family Cemetery has 17 graves with burial dates between 1894 – 2003. And Coers said she’s seen this with other cemeteries in Comal County, where “Mexican workers” were buried on the property. The Elbel’s family cemetery on the same property is neatly fenced under a giant oak tree. Colorful flowers adorn the graves, which appear to have tidy headstones large enough for personal inscriptions. The contrasting treatment stings for Francois, whose own family’s headstones are leaning sideways, decaying, and discolored. They’re plain, with just a name, date of birth, and date of death.
And, according to Francois, that “access” from the Elbels hasn’t actually followed state law: Even with 14 days notice at a “reasonable” time, she’s been unable to visit her family’s burial site for myriad reasons.
Last year, Francois planned to bring her great-grandmother poinsettias for Christmas — to adorn her own family plots with the same honor given to the family members buried in The Beierle Family Cemetery.
But the Elbels asked her to wait until Dec. 30. When they discussed January dates, the Elbels said there were hunters on the property for white-tail deer hunting season, which runs through the end of the month. Then Francois suggested February, but emails reviewed by The Barbed Wire show that the property owners said that would fall under axis deer hunting season. Then another delay was blamed on the property being used for horse training.
Ultimately, Francois wasn’t able to visit her family’s side of the cemetery again until July 4, 2024, more than 6 months after her first visit. “It’s gotten to the point where it’s unreasonable,” she said. “You try to be reasonable, but it’s ridiculous.”
Just a few weeks ago, Francois sent an email request to Leslie Degen on Nov. 18, hoping to schedule a time to deliver Christmas poinsettias to her great-grandmother for the first time. She has family in town for the holidays who are also eager to pay their respects to their ancestors.
She’s yet to receive a response.
Correction: When first published, this story incorrectly referred to Marcello as Paula Ribera’s son, when in fact he was her grandson; referred to Francois’ first attempted visit to the cemetery as happening at the ranch, when in fact she went to the veterinary clinic; and incorrectly referenced the time when the Elbels suggested the gate solution as in the fall of 2023, when in fact it was six months ago. The Barbed Wire regrets the errors.