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Spotlights » Chriss Lyon, '91
Chriss Lyon, '91, a dispatch supervisor for 911 of Berrien County, enjoys the challenge of solving mysteries. But it's when she leaves her day job that her work as a detective begins. A self-taught genealogy expert and member of the Western Michigan Genealogical Society and Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates (MSRA), Lyon spends her free time researching victims of shipwrecks and plane crashes to help long lost relatives find previously unidentified loved ones.
While Lyon studied film and video production at Grand Valley, she says she's always been intrigued by detective work and history. "My dad was a firefighter and I think that is how I became interested in disasters and mystery." Her grandmother sparked her eventual interest in genealogy through researching their own family tree.
One of Lyon's recent volunteer genealogy efforts has recently garnered extensive media coverage with the dedication of the NWA flight 2501 memorial in Berrien Springs on September 20, 2008. The ceremony marks the culmination of a project she had been working on for nearly seven years.
She first began researching flight 2501 in November of 2001, when she found an online article about the crash while putting together a genealogical history of grave sites in Berrien County. "I was shocked that so little was known or even reported about such a tragic event."
Flight 2501 crashed into Lake Michigan near the city of St. Joseph in June of 1950, and at the time, was the largest aviation disaster in U.S. history. None of the 58 passengers survived the crash and the cause of the disaster remains unknown as the wreckage has never been located. After the crash, remains that washed ashore were collected by Coast Guard officials, unceremoniously cremated and placed in an unmarked grave. The remains were nearly forgotten about until Lyon got on the case.
Though most records from the time no longer exist, in 2007 Lyon discovered two lines in an old log book of the Riverview Cemetery in Berrien Springs indicating the grave site of "plane crash victims from 1950." Family of the victims were finally able to obtain a sense of closure after more than 50 years.
MSRA and Lyon had been able to identify and contact the majority of family members, many of whom traveled to Michigan from as far away as Virginia and California for the memorial ceremony and dedication of a donated headstone containing the names of all 58 victims.
"It is so important to give family a place to go to remember their loved ones. Now they have a place to visit," explains Lyon. "We wanted to be sure that these people who were forgotten for so many years by the area would never be forgotten again."
This may seem an unlikely course for an individual who earned a bachelor of arts in film and video, but Lyon sees it differently. She thinks of genealogy as an art from, not a science. "It's researching a bunch of official documents that some people take as absolute. They are supposed to be completely accurate but there are often errors in transcription and spelling. You need to approach it with a degree of creative license, using the documents as guidelines, or else you'll miss something," she says.
Lyon looks forward to continuing her life's passion. Her success on recent projects has shed light on what else she is capable of doing. "There are so many other people out there searching for closure and so many unidentified remains. I hope in my own small way that I may be able to help with the preservation of history."
Added October 2008
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