Working With Historic Cemeteries Is Messier Than People Think
I spent years doing cemetery documentation and preservation across New England, and the first thing I learned is that most people treat old burial grounds like they're going to freeze in time if you just put up a fence. That's not how it works. Stone weathers. Ground settles. Records get lost or deliberately destroyed by families who didn't want anyone digging into certain business. The work is slow, tedious, and usually underfunded. A Graveyard Preservation Primer Lynette Strangstad came out of that kind of reality. It's not a theoretical exercise in heritage tourism. It's a practical field guide for people who are actually standing in a overgrown plot with a notebook and trying to figure out what needs to happen next. The primer covers the basics: how to survey a site, how to read weathered stone, how to document what's there before it's gone, and how to approach preservation without turning a graveyard into a museum diorama.
The Core Approach: Document Before You Touch Anything
The biggest mistake I see organizations make is jumping straight to repair or cleaning. They see a leaning headstone and think, "we need to reset this." But resetting without proper documentation means you're potentially losing the only record of that stone's original inscription. A gravestone that's been face-down in moss for forty years might have lettering you can only read if you've photographed it in specific lighting before you move it. Strangstad's primer emphasizes photographic documentation as a non-negotiable first step. Full-face shots, detail shots of inscriptions, wide shots showing the stone in context with its neighbors. The recommended workflow is straightforward: walk the site, photograph everything systematically, then begin your physical assessment. I've seen crews skip the photography because they were eager to start work and they later couldn't figure out which stone went where after a storm toppled three markers in a row. That's a costly mistake.
Reading Stone and Understanding Decay Patterns
Not all stone decays the same way. Granite holds up remarkably well in most conditions. Marble and sandstone are another story entirely, especially in acidic rain environments common in the industrial Northeast. The primer walks you through identifying the material and then understanding what kind of deterioration you're looking at. There's a specific condition called alveolar exfoliation that shows up on softer stones, particularly marble, where the surface begins to flake off in small layers. It looks like the stone is slowly shedding its skin. Once that process starts, it's generally irreversible without professional intervention, and even then the results are uncertain. The practical takeaway is that you identify the stone type early and prioritize which monuments need attention based on material vulnerability rather than just visual prominence. I once worked on a burial ground where someone had attempted to clean a marble headstone with a pressure washer. The water blast removed decades of biological growth along with the stone surface itself. The inscription was basically erased. That kind of damage is common enough that the primer specifically warns against using any pressurized water or abrasive cleaning methods on soft stone, and I'd add that this warning has prevented more than one save-the-graveyard committee from making an irrecoverable error.
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The Survey Method
The survey process in the primer is systematic but flexible enough to work with sites of varying sizes. You're recording: the location and orientation of each marker, the material, dimensions, condition, and any readable inscription. The orientation matters because it tells you something about the burial practices of the period and can help identify disturbed or relocated markers. For larger sites, grid-based surveying is more reliable than just walking randomly. Lay out a basic grid with string and stakes, number each plot systematically, and record against those numbers. I used this method at a colonial-era burial ground in southeastern Massachusetts where the cemetery had been expanded over two centuries and the plot boundaries were impossible to read visually. The grid kept everything organized and made the later data entry manageable instead of a nightmare.
Community and Family Dynamics
This part of the work is rarely discussed in preservation literature but it's often the biggest obstacle. A graveyard doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are families with descendants who have feelings about what happens to their ancestors' resting place. There are property owners who inherited the land and don't want a historic cemetery on it. There are local residents who view the site as either a neighborhood asset or an eyesore depending on their perspective. The primer addresses this practically rather than idealistically. It suggests early engagement with descendant communities, transparency about what the preservation work will and won't do, and honest conversations about funding limitations. I found that being blunt about what money was actually available prevented more relationship damage than any diplomatic approach ever could. People would rather hear the real situation upfront than be promised a full restoration and then watch it stall at six weeks.
What the Primer Doesn't Cover
No single guide covers everything, and this one has gaps that become apparent in the field. It doesn't go deeply into legal issues around trespassing, property line disputes, or the National Register nomination process. If your cemetery is on private property and the owner decides they want development, no amount of documentation will stop it without additional legal frameworks in place. That's worth understanding before you invest serious time in a site. The primer also doesn't address digital preservation tools that have become more accessible since it was written. Photogrammetry, LiDAR scanning, and structured light 3D capture are now feasible at modest budgets and can create permanent digital records far more detailed than photographs. They're supplementary, not replacements, for the manual documentation the primer teaches, but they're useful to know about if you're working on something substantial.
Where to Find It
The guide is available through the Preservation Institute's publications catalog and has been distributed through various state historic preservation offices. It's not a commercial bestseller, so don't expect it at a big-box bookstore. The online version is typically free or low-cost through state preservation websites. Check the Massachusetts Historical Commission's resource page as one reliable starting point since Strangstad's work has strong ties to that region's preservation community. If you're dealing with an actual cemetery preservation project, the primer is worth reading before you spend a single dollar on supplies. It won't solve the harder problems, but it'll keep you from making the common ones.
