Category: Photography

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.

________________________________________
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.

Infant Martha Cordelia Brummett Dec. 6, 1920, Mount Gilead Cemetery, Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana

This is representative of the sorts of headstones found on infants’ graves in this area. Sometimes there will be a small lamb lamb or a rose decorating the stone, but often the stone is completely unadorned.

Musietta Infant of Wm. J. & Nancy J. Hinkle Born Sept. 13, 1873 Died July 4, 1874, Bethel Cemetery, Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana

This is an awfully elaborate headstone for a baby’s grave, at least for this area. The lamb symbolizes innocence, and the tasseled drapery represents a mourning shroud.