It's a quiet, peaceful morning at Oak Hill Cemetery in Owosso.

The towering oak trees are still bare this time of year, but there are signs of life turning up on the ground below.

- And because of the (indiscernible) the wind can't get to them.

And so because of that, the stone remains wet.

And because of that you get spores, mold spores, and different things that come through the air.

They land on the stone and they just eventually grow and they actually become a part of the stone.

They grow into the stone because stones are porous.

- [Stefanie] While memories fade with time, nature has its own way of moving forward.

That's where Michael Clapp comes in.

He, along with his wife Mary, carefully and thoughtfully restore gravestones of loved ones, long gone.

It all started when Mary's grandpa passed and eventually went from hobby to business.

- I cleaned it last week about five days ago.

We would go there, tend to his grave, you couldn't help but notice in the graves nearby, some of them were untended, they were, you know, overgrown or, you know, covered with moss and different things like that.

And it was a sad thing to see and you wanted to fix them, so that's what we started doing.

This polished area doesn't have much lichen growth.

There is some bleeding over onto the polished area, but you have this texture here and then you've got this roughly huen section on the sides where it's cut.

That attracts lichen, you know, and it sticks to it, it just lays there, it grows into the pores of the stone and just stays there and just will overtake the stone in due time.

The ones that seem to be especially forlorn, where you could assume there were no family members taking care of them and nobody left to do anything, you get kind of addicted after a while because you see the place brighten up and you're trimming and you're doing all these different things and it cleaned up grandpa's neighborhood, you know, and we just kind of started adopting graves and different areas.

I wanna clean this away now because it'll get a little bit moist and I don't want these in the way.

(bright music) - [Stefanie] At the ready with various buckets and products, Michael gets to work restoring the memory of the person behind this marker.

- It's almost like washing a car.

You've got brushes, you've got a bucket.

If you're gonna use a certain type of soap, you're just brushing away at the monument.

This is granite, so you don't really have to worry.

It's just a stiff bristle brush.

There's Orvis and some people use this soap or whatever and you have to be careful with that, but you'll use a bucket if you're gonna use Orvis soap.

- [Stefanie] You can't even see the name etched into the stone because of the rampant moss and lichen, but with some heavy elbow grease, a life revealed on the surface.

Eveline Hood Cummings, laid to rest next to her husband William Cummings.

A point of pride from Michael.

- I hate to see people forgotten.

I hate to see something that's undone and I've always been somebody that pays a lot of attention to detail and that's a good thing, but it can also kind of cause you to linger too long somewhere, or what you think is sometimes too long.

- [Stefanie] Of course, these days, not everyone chooses to spend eternity in a cemetery.

But for the friends and family who do have loved ones below the ground, the Clapps makes sure their memory is pristinely preserved for many more years to come.

- There's some really old ones here.

You know, there's some dated 1868.

I think the oldest one I've seen here is 1865 and they can use a good cleaning, so it's very tempting.

It's just good to see old things made to appear new again.