Working in Graveyards A. Cleaning and "Restoring" If you are working on your family tree, you are almost certainly visiting cemeteries. "Visiting" may not be quite the right term: inhabiting may come closer for those of you who spend more time trying to read old, worn gravestone inscriptions than you spend at home! In any case, sooner or later you are going to encounter small, possibly private, cemeteries that have had no care in decades. They may have been vandalized, overgrown, made practically inaccessible. The stones may be sinking out of sight, broken, fallen over, covered with moss and/or lichen, worn, faded, nearly or actually illegible. You, a group from your church, the Boy or Girl Scouts, your family, or everyone who owes you a debt, may want to clean up that cemetery and repair the monuments. You need to know that there are many people who believe very strongly that you should NOT touch that cemetery, on the grounds that if you don't know what you're doing, you can make things much worse! Our opinion is that clea! ning the grounds, clearing brush, pulling weeds, and the like are not nearly as controversial as trying to repair gravestones. Don't pull trees out by the roots if the roots may have grown into the coffins and other remains. Have respect for the dead while cleaning up. Take pictures before, during, and after everything you do in there. Don't remove any rocks or stones - they may have been all the markers that families could afford! That about covers all anyone can say about cemetery site cleaning, except for the obvious fact that you must get permission from the owner of the cemetery (there always is one somewhere) before you do anything whatsoever! When it comes to repairing gravestones, the commonest advice is go get an expert. That typically means someone from out of town who charges money for advice. How does one get to be an expert in repairing gravestones? By having somehow successfully repaired gravestones. This is how one becomes an expert at anything! Can YOU learn all that is known about the successful repair of damaged gravestones? Most assuredly. There are no degrees in it, and it does not have certification agencies. One warning however; the REPAIR of gravestones and the RESTORATION of gravestones are two different things. The common or garden variety genealogist will neither have the knowledge nor be able to obtain the highly specialized equipment and materials that would be needed to RESTORE a damaged or worn out gravestone, as that term implies "returning it to approximately its original condition". Don't claim to the owner that what you are going to do is "restore" the cemetery. So if (and only if) you find that the owner of the cemetery, or the organization responsible for it (which could be the town or county) neither intends nor has funds for its repair or cleanup, yet would like to have it repaired/cleaned, and if you receive clear permission to provide this service, then we suggest you do the following: a.. Make notes of any limitations, restrictions, or requirements associated with the permission you or your group was given. You absolutely must follow them. b.. Have your browser go to the following links, where you can learn how to repair grave markers as well as anyone anywhere knows how to do. Detailed Instructions #1 Successful Projects What the Government Learned The Most Important One [Return to top] B. Reading Hard-To-Read Inscriptions There are literally thousands of Internet sites that offer advice on this subject. Half of them seem to assume the cemetery is in your back yard, you have at least six helpers to carry your supplies, and you have six months to spend working out the contents of the faded inscriptions. I will make a few comments here for the person who makes a quick drive to an out of the way cemetery, or the person who happens to spot an interesting one along the highway and decides to take a quick walk-through. In either case, he (she, you, whoever) spots a gravestone with an inscription vaguely suggestive in its faded illegibility of a name you are researching for your family tree. But you can't quite make it out! Too worn, too overgrown with lichens, too crumbled on the edges. What can you do without a lot of special equipment? First, forget about shaving cream. Using it is equivalent, in my book, to ripping the pages out of public phone books. You got what you wanted, and to .... with anyone else! Will shaving cream hurt the stone? No, Nature will hurt the stone. The shaving cream will just make it easier for Nature to do the job. Do you really need a technical explanation, for example from a chemist who minored in geology? O.K., you asked for it. Have you ever seen a rock cliff without rock chip debris at the bottom of it? I seriously doubt it. Breaking loose chips from the surface of rocks happens because water gets into all the cracks and expands or contracts with temperature. Eventually it breaks off chips. This happens just as easily, only the chips are tiny, with a gravestone. When you use shaving cream, the water in the tiny cracks doesn't completely evaporate (dry), because the emollients from the cream prevent it (that's what emollients are for!). The small amounts of fatty acids also ten! d to form a crust over the moisture in the cracks, further preventing evaporation. So the moisture is trapped there, dutifully expanding and contracting (or worst of all, freezing!) and breaking off tiny chips until the carvings have been blurred hopelessly. Was that a "C", "O", "Q", or "G" ? We'll never know. Can't you rinse the cream all off? No, because it's in the cracks! How about rubbings? After all, taking rubbings of gravestones has been a venerable hobby for centuries! Sadly, good rubbings require special equipment and a lot of practice. You are not going to be able to do rubbings worth doing when you unexpectedly stumble upon an interesting cemetery during an evening drive. But if you want to learn the technique, I recommend the following source: www.savinggraves.com/education/bookshelf/rubbings.htm. Good luck. So what do I really recommend? In general, regardless of what clever trick I've tried from somebody's web site (and most of them are summarized on www.savinggraves.org/education/bookshelf/alternative.htm), I've always found it easier to read a difficult inscription from a photograph than directly. You want the camera facing the inscription straight on, but you want the light coming from the side. The ideal would be for the light to just skim the surface, so shadows will be entirely inside the inscriptions. You may be able to arrange that with a mirror, or even aluminum foil flattened over cardboard, to reflect sunlight from the side across the front of the stone. If the sun is right behind you as you crouch there with your camera, you will need two helpers. One holds the reflector while the other blocks the direct sunlight. If even this approach isn't enough, but you can get water, spraying the stone with PLAIN WATER will help because the inside of the carvings will absorb m! ore water than the surface, giving a different reflectivity. If there is no sun, e.g. it is raining or very overcast (or dusk), you may be able to aim your flash at the reflector instead of directly at the stone. Then the real trick is, scan the picture or transfer the digital picture file into a computer and process the image with software that can control the contrast and brightness! There are too many commercial programs of this type for me to be fair in recommending one. I use a freeware picture viewer/editor named Irfanview. Enhancing the contrast may help or hurt. Experiment and find out! [Return to top] [Return to Main Menu]