Susan Campbell has written an article, Cataloging Gravestones An Expression Of Their Faith, in The Hartford Courant (CT), about a couple of ladies doing some community service – namely documenting and measuring cemeteries that haven’t had such work done to them in 70 years. These kinds of projects will be a boon to future genealogists, it’s just a shame that there are countless cemeteries that haven’t been documented yet.
Excerpt from the article:
If you drove by East Granby Center Cemetery any time during the hottest part of the summer, you couldn’t miss two neatly dressed women painstakingly copying information off the gravestones.
Their presence was one part luck, one part need and one part Mormon theology.
The small cemetery is one of roughly 2,400 scattered around the state. Some, like East Granby’s, are in good repair. Others have been mostly left to the elements. But in most, the treasure trove of history contained on the stones hasn’t been recorded in generations.
The women, Mormon missionaries Wendy Allred and Dayna Anderson, worked to fulfill a four-hour-a-week community service requirement, and then they drew a grid to make finding the graves – which date to the 1700s – easier. They also measured the stones.