Day: September 4, 2010

Cemeteries, Photography

Margaret Bonewell

Shelly

IMG_5391
Margaret A. Wife of E. Bonewell Born Apr. 17, 1830. Died Apr. 4, 1892.
Mount Moriah Cemetery, Bucklew Road, Spencer, Owen County, Indiana

I’m slowly uploading photos I took last spring to Findagrave. I finished Bethel and River Hill Cemeteries last week and am currently working on Mount Moriah. It’s a tedious, time-consuming job, which is why I’m so far behind on it[1]. It’s not made any easier by the fact that in one section of the cemetery, the stones have discolored. I have no idea whether there’s something strange about the composition of the stone itself or maybe someone tried to clean the markers with something that caused an unfortunate chemical reaction or what. Whatever the cause, there are a bunch of blackened stones there.

I was tempted not to even try photographing them, because the inscriptions were almost impossible to make out. I’m glad I did, though. The photos aren’t great, but they are fairly well legible. Someone else uploaded images from the same cemetery to Findagrave but didn’t include the blackened stones. I wonder if she even tried photographing them?

Alsotoo, this is why I sometimes take some of my headstone photos at such weird angles. I’m trying to make the light work for me, to get as much contrast from shadows and highlights as possible. If I’d taken a head-on photo of the above stone, it would have just been a solid black mess.

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1. First, the images have to be processed, to make the inscriptions as legible as possible. Then I upload them to Flickr and transcribe them. During the transcriptions, I have to do a lot of searching at Ancestry to make sure I’m interpreting the dates as correctly as possible. And then I re-upload them to Findagrave. If someone else has already created a record for the person, it’s pretty straightforward to add an image. If not, I have to create a new record and add the headstone image and inscription.

And before any of that can be done, I have to get out and take the images, which involves trying to figure out which cemeteries are the least well documented but also accessible (not on private property). I also have to look at satellite images, to try to figure out how large the cemetery is. I’m trying to visit just the smaller ones at this point, because they seem to be the most overlooked. If I ever run out of smaller graveyards, I’ll move onto larger ones, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.

Ladybusiness

Elizabeth Dixon Smith Geer

Shelly

Another passage from Elizabeth Dixon Smith Geer’s journal caught my attention. Some of the women write about taking the opportunity to explore the strange landscapes they see along the trail. Elizabeth’s husband trekked up a mountain and noted the striations of the rocks and the fossils contained within them. He described them to his wife when he returned.

August 7 [1847]

made 15 miles encamped on Blacks fork a small river bordered with willows this large waste of country in my opinion has once been a see my husband found on top of a mountain sea shells petrified in the stone the creaces in the rocks show the different stages of the water.

Geer, Elizabeth Dixon Smith, 1808/9?-1855, Diary of Elizabeth Dixon Geer, August, 1847, in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, vol. 1: 1840-1849. Holmes, Kenneth L., editor and compiler.  Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, page 136.

What also struck me about this entry is that it shows that not just the poor and uneducated set out for the west. Clearly, Elizabeth and her husband possessed knowledge of natural history and an understanding that the world we know was once vastly different. (The basic rules of spelling and punctuation may be another matter, however!)