JOHNSTOWN -- One-hundred-sixteen years after he survived the Great Johnstown Flood, 109 years after he died, and five hours after a judge granted a petition to move him to higher ground, Henry Leckey was out of the clay of Sandyvale Cemetery and en route to the suburbs.

He traveled light: a shattered skull, some surprisingly perfect teeth, a left thigh bone, bits of a jacket and the sole of a size-8 shoe were Henry. His first wife, Mary, who died 14 years before him, made the journey as well. Diggers found bones and a dress. They loaded the couple into a concrete vault and drove them to Grandview Cemetery on Westmont hill, where they will share a common grave after a singularly uncommon rescue.

"I don't want my great-great grandparents under a pond," said Donald Leckey, a Michigan engineer who spent years seeking his ancestors and, upon finding their grave, was mortified at plans to turn their cemetery into a memorial botanical garden, complete with decorative pond, fruit trees and a recreation area -- all of it, presumably, atop the nearly 3,000 early Johnstowners interred there.

By journey's end, Mr. Leckey had spent $17,000 of his own money for the research and exhumation. Standing in a rain-drizzled morning as the bones of his ancestors were loaded onto a truck, Mr. Leckey said the officers of Sandyvale Memorial Gardens and Arboretum were free to build and plant what they liked, but not over top of his great-great grandfather. Henry Leckey had come here from Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany, in the mid-19th century, changed his name from Johann Heinrich to Henry, and became a blacksmith at the Cambria Iron and Steel Works.

"It's a cemetery. No matter how many years ago it happened, the people who are buried here meant something to a lot of people while they were on this earth," Mr. Leckey said.

To pull off yesterday's afterlife evacuation, Mr. Leckey, who moved from Johnstown to Ann Arbor, Mich., 40 years ago, teamed with his brother Edward, an Edgewood attorney. To meet the legal requirement that any direct descendant had to be given a chance to object to the exhumation, they tracked down 212 descendants of Henry and Mary. They hired Elissa Scalise Powell, a genealogist from Marshall, to gather the names and ended up sending out more than 180 letters appended to a court order asking them to show up in court if they didn't want their ancestors disinterred.

"I mailed 182 copies of the citation," said Ed Leckey. "You can't imagine how many distant relatives I talked to."

Leckey descendants phoned from Texas, Colorado, Arizona, California and Maine. None objected to moving the great-great grandparents.

"Most of them wanted a list of the heirs," Ed Leckey said. Three of them showed up in court yesterday to meet Donald, Ed and their wives for the first time, and to see if they could get some help in getting someone from their own side of the family moved out of Sandyvale.

"I'm kind of an amateur genealogist myself," said Jean Brehm, who drove in from Euclid, Ohio, for what turned out to be a three-minute court proceeding with a one-year buildup.

It began with an afternoon stroll through the largely abandoned cemetery in October of last year. Donald Leckey and his wife, Elizabeth Copland, a physician, doubted Henry Leckey was still in Sandyvale. After the flood of 1936, the Army Corps of Engineers moved more than 2,000 graves so they could pave the river walls for a flood control project.

Walking the single road that remains open in the cemetery, they came across an overturned column:

Henry Leckey
April 11, 1821
April 4, 1896
Mary
Wife of Henry Leckey
Oct. 18, 1817
Oct. 21, 1882

Suddenly convinced his great-great grandfather was still in Sandyvale, Mr. Leckey phoned Ernie Coby, a volunteer caretaker. Mr. Coby told him plans were under way to convert the place to a "memorial garden."

Dr. Copland sent off for information on the proposed Sandyvale Memorial Botanical Garden and Arboretum.

The committee returned a catalogue that showed a visitor's center, fountain, a veritable park on the last large, open tract in this industrial city.

The plan proposed, among other things, "the tasteful, artful and sensitive use of remaining gravestones within the gardens in concert with the concept of garden cemeteries."

Along with an area for plays, weddings and concerts, the plan includes an "events terrace," "rental court," "flower garden," "enabling garden," "healing garden" and a "family discovery garden" that will include a feature called "frog folly" as well as a "running and rolling hill."

"If they were just putting flowers on it, I could see that," said Mr. Coby, who attended yesterday's exhumation. "When you start putting buildings and lakes and all that other baloney on it, I don't think you're honoring the dead. Flowers? Yeah. But not buildings."

Precisely what to do with Sandyvale has been a matter of question for years. Like Johnstown itself, the cemetery once had a larger population and, as with the town, the years have not always been kind.

The cemetery opened in 1856 on 11 acres of plots on the spot where Jacob Horner once had his farm. The first plot was purchased by Thomas Duran.

Since that time, an estimated 5,516 people have been buried there and almost half of them removed to make way for flood control work. The 200 or so tombstones that have survived three floods, river wall paving on the adjacent Stonycreek River, and seven generations of teenagers, are a catalog of names that built the city: Horner, Jacoby, Benshoff, Cramer, Wissinger, Shaffer.

But after the 1930s, with families burying their dead in the hilltop cemeteries in Westmont, Geistown and Richland, Sandyvale fell into disrepair, its graves largely unmarked.

"Its use has been relegated to Frisbee tossing and dog walking," wrote Phyllis Oyler, in the introduction to her 1986 book about the cemetery.

The last burial at Sandyvale took place in spring of 1977, when the family of Susan Kritchko got permission to reopen the cemetery long enough to bury her next to her husband. Weeks later, the last big Johnstown Flood swept through the Conemaugh Valley and over Sandyvale, pushing away many stones and leaving debris that National Guard volunteers scraped away.

Diane Kabo, an officer with the group seeking to build the botanical garden, said the cleanup crews scraped away an undetermined number of tombstones as well.

"The only way we could find to preserve it was to make a garden out of it," Ms. Kabo said, adding that she was surprised the Leckey family objected to the botanical garden proposal, which she said has community support.

As for the pond, "the reflecting pond may not be as big as it was on that plan."

Precisely who remains at Sandyvale and how to find them is a mystery worthy of the combined efforts of a genealogist, an engineer and a surveyor. Records covering 1909 to 1936 were carried away in the second flood. Tombstones were scattered in 1889, then 1936 and again in 1977. An estimated 614 veterans from the Revolutionary War through World War II are buried there.

The Leckeys were found because the earlier records were tucked away in an office on higher ground. But actually locating the couple yesterday seemed, at points, in doubt.

Matt and Mike Walkowski, brothers who have done a few dozen exhumations in the past, worked a backhoe gingerly, then, at a little more than three feet down, came across a brass coffin handle. Then another. And still another. But they found no bones. They found glass -- evidence of a Victorian-era glass-windowed casket.

As Donald Leckey drove to Grandview to make arrangements to have a fresh grave opened there to receive what might be found, the Walkowski brothers climbed into the ground and began scraping away.

Shortly after noon, they found the first bones. A short time later, Henry Leckey's skull was on a tarp beside the open grave. A small, ivory button from a long-vanished shirt rested beside his bones. The sole of his shoe and remnants of his jacket were there.

But they could not find Mary.

"I hope we found the right guy," Mike Walkowski grimaced.

A few feet deeper, and a little farther to Henry's left than they'd expected, they found pieces of a hundred-year-old dress and, beneath it, Mary's bones.

By the time sunlight broke through and Donald Leckey returned, his physician wife, Dr. Copland, was identifying bones: a femur, a fibula, a heel bone.

Donald and Ed Leckey were marveling over something their newly discovered relative, Mrs. Brehm, had brought them. It was a photograph of Johann Heinrich Leckey and his sons, taken sometime after the family had arrived, member-by-member, in America.

"This might have been the best find of all," he said. "This was worth everything."

Before the vault departed with its muddy contents, the Walkowskis winched up the Leckey family grave marker, which lay a hundred yards away, along the side of the cemetery road, toppled along with almost every other stone in the place.

"After I found the marker, do you know what Elissa said to me?" Donald Leckey asked. "She said, 'I think they wanted you to find them.'"

A graveside service for Henry and Mary Leckey will be held this morning at Grandview Cemetery, suburban Johnstown. Understandably, no visitation is planned.