West Virginia cemetery preservation proves popular workshop topic
Oct. 19—FAIRMONT — Due to popular demand, Joni Morris will hold a second cemetery workshop at the Highland Avenue United Methodist Church on Oct. 28 in Bellevue. The event, partially funded by the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia, aims to teach members of the community the skills to help preserve the information found on gravestones. Aside from functioning as a place to memorialize people who have died, cemeteries also serve as the last repository of history, meaning they might be the final place holding proof that a person existed.
"This project aims to increase the number of West Virginians who have the knowledge to locate and document cemeteries, as well as increase the number of West Virginia cemeteries that have been GPS located and documented," Morris said. " It also aims to increase the number of West Virginians who have the knowledge to preserve and restore gravestones."
Gravestones are damaged by both time and human activity. West Virginia's thaw and freeze cycle is particularly punishing on the stone. Water gets into the cracks. Slate and sandstone markers are particularly vulnerable to a process called delamination, which results in layers of stone actually breaking. That's important to know because that type of stone was used in markers from the early 1800s, making those early markers the most susceptible. Lichens, mold, bugs all damage the stone as well. This endangers the precious information, such as names or dates, etched onto the face of the rock.
By teaching participants the work of cemetery preservation, Morris hopes that the information contained inside will become more publicly accessible to families, researchers and genealogists. It will also preserve the gravestones themselves for future generations to encounter.
The workshop is split into two pieces, a classroom portion and practical exercise. The classroom portion will cover topics such as Appalachian burial and funerary history, culture and beliefs, how to digitally document a cemetery using mobile apps, gravestone marker identification and best practices for taking pictures of the gravestone. The class will also cover what cleaning tools and solutions to use in order to avoid damaging a headstone.
The practical portion of the workshop will allow participants to put the knowledge they learned in the classroom to use out in the field.
So far, the workshop has proven extremely popular. Morris said the original workshop last Saturday ran out of space. This next one is already on track to do so as well.
This type of work is important because the more people that learn to document the information on gravestones, the more information will be saved. It's especially important in the cases of forgotten or abandoned cemeteries. Morris said a lot of West Virginia's cemeteries are up on mountainsides and not a lot of people are aware of them. It's especially crucial for indigenous and minority cemeteries that don't receive a lot of attention. The more people that pick up this training, the more people are available to fan out and save the last records ever made of a people that once existed.
"There's a cemetery in Huntington that I did a workshop in, Memorial Park, and it is an African American cemetery that has been unfortunately forgotten over the last 50 years," Morris said. "During our workshop, we actually located four or five gravestones and we were able to document over 100 gravestones while we were there. So that's real important."
Jacob Blackwell, a member of both AmeriCorps and the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia, said the mission of the Alliance is to preserve as much of West Virginia's heritage as possible. Cemeteries are a big part of that, he said, pointing out that they preserve the story of people who may not have been notable in their day but were as important as anyone else. They provide a bridge to the past for families as well.
"You have family lineages, a lot of people that still have their families in an area for generations," he said. "Sometimes those records get lost. Sometimes those burial sites get forgotten, and then, through preservation work, we're able to go back and reconnect these families together. They can follow their lineage, they can see their history and that helps deepen and strengthen the story of the history of the area."
It's also a bulwark against systemic racism, meaning that a historically Black cemetery might be targeted for land development, Blackwell said. When that happens, a developer might misrepresent burial plots or misrepresent the scale of the graveyard and work to make people forget that people are buried there, so the land can be developed. The work that goes into cemetery preservation helps prevent that and helps stop people from being forgotten.
This is the first year that this particular workshop is being offered. Last fall, Morris taught it as a basic teaching tool for the fundamentals of findagrave.com and other digital applications, but it grew until it took the much fuller shape it is today. The Preservation Alliance does other workshops as well, but this particular one is Morris' baby.
Morris said that there will be one more preservation workshop after this one, but it'll be held in North Charleston on Nov. 4. She's planning more for next spring. For more information, visit the Preservation Alliance's workshop at pawv.org.
Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com
