A little more than three years ago, Al Wolf decided to start hunting for historical markers, which he would then photograph and catalog for a national database found at www.hmdb.org

We all know what historical markers are. They’re those steel signs and plaques we see on the side of the road all over the place, in town, along country highways and stuck in parks.

Recording historical markers started out as a hobby, says Wolf, a former teacher and now insurance agency owner in Veedersburg, a little town near the Illinois border.

“But marker hunting is like hunting mushrooms,” he says. “It gets in your blood.”

Wolf’s blood is now thoroughly contaminated. Last week, he says, he and his wife racked up 354 miles driving to various historical markers, noting their addresses and GPS coordinates and taking close-up photos that can be read and stand-back photos showing where the marker stands.

The goal for Wolf is to make sure that every historical marker in the state gets recorded on the hmdb.org website, which has been in operation about five years and aims to make a record of as many such markers all over the world as possible.

Recording the markers is a lot of work. In the past 3 1/2 years, Wolf covered only the western part of the state. He still has 54 counties to go, and there aren’t many other historical marker nuts like him in Indiana. “Two or three,” he says.

He’s 70, too. Who’s to say he’ll even be around next week, much less several years from now? he asks. He needs help with his hobby turned obsession.

Why bother, though?

Take war memorials, Wolf says. “War memorials say ‘So we never forget.’ But we do forget.” History gets lost and forgotten.

Memorials get knocked down by cars. They get stolen. They get destroyed in all kinds of ways.

“Look at the tornadoes” that recently leveled towns through the Midwest and South, Wolf says. They probably took down their share of historical markers.

“Who says they (the markers) are going to be there” in the future, he asked? “Who says we know what’s on them?” When historical markers are lost, “Do we have to discover it (what the signs said) all over again?”

So Wolf is suggesting a great summer pastime for people all over Indiana. Become a historical marker hunter in the county where you live. Photograph and record them.

People can hunt not only along the roads, he says, but in their attics.

Already lots of history has been lost, or never recorded, Wolf says. Abraham Lincoln, for example, made 10 stops in Indiana while taking the train to Washington, D.C., to be inaugurated. Only five of those stops have historical markers. One, in Stateline City, records the words he spoke on that stop, but the depot is gone and no one has a photograph of it. Maybe, Wolf says, someone will find a picture of the old depot in a pile of old family photos. It’s a piece of history.

Allen County has 33 historical markers recorded on the website, complete with multiple photographs and detailed explanations of the history involved. Not all the county’s historical markers are listed, though, and some surrounding counties have no historical markers listed on the site at all.

Wolf says the effort can be educational and an excellent teaching tool. It sounds like interesting recreation, too. I can name any number of historical markers I’ve driven by, and each time I think, one of these days I’m going to stop and read that. Twenty-five years later, there are plenty I have never stopped to read.