Transcripts For CSPAN3 African American Cemeteries 20151107

Neglected and have few archival records regarding the burial. Ms. Rainville talks about how people can contribute to documenting these. [applause] ms. Rainville welcome today and thank you for coming on a lovely day. What i want to do in todays talk is take you through the process of locating old cemeteries, what you do when you find him, why they are important and what you can learn from , them. Very much a guidebook to these historic sites. I should say as a caveat, a lot of the rationale behind finding old cemeteries, while my research is focused on africanamerican cemeteries, very often pertains to white cemeteries and other cemeteries of the areas backgrounds. In terms of my research i , focused on the virginia piedmont, specifically areas in virginia, amherst county, nelson county. These are scientifically chosen. It had to do with where i lived and the counties i commuted to to go to work. [laughter] ms. Rainville it means if you are asking on counties not on that route, i will take a good guess. But within those counties, and albemarleem are in and amherst counties, that is where the 150 cemeteries are that i visited and studied for this research. On the map in the lower righthand corner do not worry, there will not be a quiz but the four digits you are looking at are the foundlings of these counties by european americans. I would also point out that if your interests are in native american Burial Grounds, those , of course, date back tens of thousands of years in virginia. Those were not the focus of my research. But, of course, in this region there are also hundreds and , hundreds of unmarked native burials as well. So, the chronology cemeteries, one of the most important things about cemeteries is they function as Outdoor Museums. While they are obviously a place mourning and loss, more broadly when you study the m more holistically you would quickly come to realize that you can read the gravestones and they provide insight into local history. It is like a reading not just family stories, but community stories. And then more broadly, these stories in my case the story of race in virginia in the last 200 years and racial relations. Towards the end, when i was selecting cemeteries to study i , always tried to look at gravestones distributed in different eras. Most notably, the antebellum area, which included slave communities and free blacks. And then reconstruction, the jim crow era, and finally the era of , migration for africanamerican families and continued segregation. Folks everyone that cemeteries once a cemetery was segregated, for example if it was segregated for the last 150 years you dont desegregate the cemetery. That always stays as a representation of a past era. You can integrate a cemetery moving forward, but it stays there. And in the case of a lot of Public Cemeteries in virginia, it stays there as a demarcation between white and black areas in Public Cemeteries. As i promised, i wanted to take you through some of the steps using some examples from my research of how you can locate these cemeteries. Because this is usually one of the most common questions i get. Again, sorry tools for finding historic cemeteries would apply to any old cemeteries. Like looking at old maps, asking older members of the community if they remember asking a , funeral home or a church. But in the case of africanamerican cemeteries, especially 19thcentury africanamerican cemeteries, sometimes these sites have overgrown and been forgotten. This example on the lefthand side, i am standing in the middle of a thicket. It is not just that cemeteries are overgrown, somehow they are always overgrown with things that are prickly. I dont know what it is about the state of virginia in prickly things. I have fought my way into the middle of a thicket and am actually standing next to a gravestone. Looking out, those are two of my students from sweet briar wondering if they are getting paid enough to come in and join me. This is a cemetery down in alta vista. This is one of the lynch family homes. This is a Slave Cemetery located about half a mile from the old big house. This is a common pattern with slave cemeteries. That they are located one quarter of a mile to half of a mile away from the Plantation House. Very often, the Plantation House will have a cemetery for the plantation owners much closer to the house. In this case, whats happened between the founding of the plantation and the Slave Cemetery is that the railroad went through in the 1850s and 1860s. So now, the Slave Cemetery you , drive on a road, you go up on the railroad tracks, and you get to a big, empty field and in the middle of the field is of this thicket. This is one of the clues of an old cemetery. Again, it could be a black or White Cemetery, but if you have a field that is otherwise crops are being planted, livestock is grazing, and then you have this suspicious cluster of trees or bushes, something that for some reason hasnt been taken down at some point, you always want to check that out first. We went and investigated and found the pattern on the right hand side. Which if you stop and think , about it for a moment, its very suspicious and not have all not at all what we were expecting to see. We have numbered each stone. We are the ones that added the flags. Of course, in a cemetery, while there are lots of different patterns, you always expect there to be spaces in between the stones because you need room for the bodies. In this case, the stones were clustered together and as it turns out, they were clustered together on two different trees on opposite sides of this thicket. When i asked more and looked into oral histories i was told , that in the 1950s a farmer who was grazing cattle in the area was disturbed because they kept tripping over gravestones, so he picked up the gravestones and moved them to either side to help his cows. This is not the only time people have told me that this had happened, though this was one of the more noticeable end result. Because nobody ever put the stones back. This, of course, is what we want to avoid. And one of the reasons why i encourage people you dont have to have a special training i will give you a badge if if you want it but i would encourage anyone to go back in your local communities and help locate these old sites so that they can be protected proactively before the stones are moved. So, in addition to these suspicious thickets or clusters of trees and otherwise cloud fields another pattern for old 19th or even 20th century cemeteries would be to look for the broader cultural context. By that i mean look for an old black school, old black churches. This is an example in albemarle county, the rose hill school. It has been close for many decades. It closed around the time of integration. It was formerly an africanamerican school. On the righthand side, the Rose Hill Church founded back in the 1880s, and this was a much more recent building. If you are looking for 19thcentury cemetery and you get to wayside, like i did, and see what is clearly a 20th Century Church made out of concrete blocks and think that this cannot be the right place, of course the wooden churches burned a lot and had all sorts of different troubles. So that in and of itself does not mean that you wont find an old and wonderful cemetery nearby. Indeed, this site had a cemetery with about 170 burials dating to the 19th century. The other pattern, especially for slave cemeteries is the one , that i was describing before. This is an aerial view from google maps of sweet briar. Many of you probably realize that Sweet Briar College was formerly a plantation. The college was founded by the will of a woman who died in 1900 and she herself was the daughter of a slave owner who had arrived from vermont in 1811. This, today our campus is the very center area, where the yellow square is. In the lower lefthand corner, that red circle, that would be the plantation owner cemetery where, for example, a large of fletcher and her daughter indiana, are buried. Indiana founded Sweet Briar College. The red triangle is where the Slave Cemetery is located. We know from records that in 1860 after elijah died, as his estate was being appraised, he owned over 145 individuals. And that Slave Cemetery has 60 remaining burials today. This is the pattern, especially for some we still have so many of the old 19th century plantations that are Still Standing. While all the land may not be intact, you can ignore modernday land boundaries and look for this sort of pattern if you are looking for an old, antebellum africanamerican cemetery. Another factor here is that both of these cemeteries white and black, are , located on hilltops. It was a common pattern to put any cemetery, even to this day, on a hilltop, for a variety of reasons, a symbolic and practical. You want to avoid the water table when you bury the dead and hilltop locations our one way to do that. If all else has failed and you have not found a cemetery on a map and dont have the pattern to look for, one of the most valuable assets would be Community Members. I was fortunate in my work. At least 30 of my leads came from people in the community. It can start with the vaguest of rumors, and in this particular instance, this was a librarian at the university of virginia. She wasnt from virginia. She had only been in her house for a couple of years. But someone in the neighborhood told her that they thought there was an old Black Cemetery in her backyard. Keep in mind, her backyard was many acres, so that didnt narrow it down. She had always been curious. You do this work and you quickly become the cemetery lady and the person that everyone calls one they are looking for these things. So, she called me up to asked if i would look for it and that was early on. I am doing this 15 years now. This was probably the second or third year and i was confident that i had a special gift at finding these things, so i said of course i will. So i go to her house and spent an hour or two with her german following me the whole time. Then i go back, and she said theres another thing that her neighbors had been telling her. Hern, the man in the center, had been living here a long time. When i want to talk to him, it turned out not only did he know, it was his Family Cemetery. So he came back with me and we traipsed around. In that case, it took about an and we were about to give up, hour. Going over the picture on the left this was not like hiking on a trail, there were fallen trees, groundhog pits. Just as we were able to give up, the sun was setting, that far picture of the gravestone, as the sun was setting that it lit up one of the stones. As is often the case in these old 19th century cemeteries, most of the stones look like this one. They were field stones. Regularly occurring stones that did not have an inscription. It wasnt that we were looking for a tall, white obelisk in the woods that would be easy to find. Mr. Herns, when we found this site, there were 12 burials here , and the only burial that had an inscription that we could read was for a little girl named marian. When i read it out loud, you had to crouch down, that was a metal marker he said that that was his , sister and that her burial, back in the 1920s when she was very young was the last time he had been in the cemetery because after his sister was buried, he grew up. He went into the military. He left virginia for a series of decades. By the time he came back, his grandmother had sold the land and the home he grew up in. And he was told, incorrectly, by some of the white neighbors that now that the family did not own the property it would be illegal for him he would be trespassing if he went back to the cemetery. To make matters worse, in the 1970s as he got older, he approached a lawyer about trying to get access to the site, and she told him, also incorrectly that if he would pay her she , would try to work the system for him. So, his visit with me was the first time that he had come back to the site. This tells us so many things about these cemeteries, but the first, thecus on virginia statute provides access to any descendent to their cemeteries. Trump, Donald Trumps son, who runs a vineyard on land that is former plantation land could not deny someone access to a Family Cemetery if there was one on his land. Second, these oral traditions are so very important, both that he could help me identify who this girl was because as many of you realized, since she died in the 20s, she was not on the census anywhere. She was born after the 1920 census and she died before 1930. This is just some of the insight that we get from these cemeteries, and another reason why it is very important to proactively locate them and produce maps, so that other people know where these burials are located. So sometimes it is very hard to locate these cemeteries. Other times, they are really hidden in plain sight. Some of you might recognize in the lower righthand corner i have not indicated what it is, i indicated the other stuff. The other green thing is Scott Stadium the university of , virginia football stadium. For those of you who have not been to Scott Stadium, it must hold 120,000 people, located a stones throw away from the lawn, the rotunda, the center of campus. And in turn, a stones throw away from that football stadium, ryrst if we look at the mau plantation, that arrow is pointing to a house that is Still Standing in the upper lefthand corner. That is located in what is today faculty housing. At university of virginia, right off fontaine avenue. If you are going to the football game, you will probably drive by it. That, in turn, was a 19thcentury plantation of by the maury family. What this map does not show any longer is the maury family has their own cemetery a couple of hundred yards away from that Plantation House. When they why didnt the road, fontaine avenue, the family decided that they would relocate their cemetery a little bit of a ways away. So their cemetery is gone but if , it was still there, it would fit the pattern i described before. A White Cemetery with another Slave Cemetery a quarter to half a mile away. Virginia is in every nook and cranny of this neighborhood today. The slave cemeteries, outlined in the center of those buildings, those are dorms. The reason they are in that kind of funny shape, bracketing the empty what looks like a driveway, is because the driveway is the location of dozens and dozens of slave burials. These were the individuals who worked at the maury plantation. The extra twist to the story is that when i went to look for the was one ofin, it those he said, she said, lynn, you found the uva Slave Cemetery, right . At that time, i myself lived no more than three quarters of a mile from here. I trumped over with my dog, and it took me an hour and a half. That was because first of all, someone told me it was in the wrong place. When i got there i was asking , students, staff, people who worked in the cafeteria and no one had any idea what i was talking about, even though they walked through it and around it constantly. There are no surviving stones, which does make it difficult. They knew it was a burial site when they went to build the dorms and they brought in archaeologists to survey the burials. But at the time, they decided they knew were the burials were but did not remark them with any stones. People can be forgiven for not recognizing it, but uva did try to mark it with a soft brush with a sign. But the only problem is that this marker on the lefthand side is the one that is the plaque in the center of the stone wall. And that stone wall, it might be hard to see from my photograph but it is a resting spot on a very steep staircase that goes up a hill. What everyone would do is they get up halfway on the stairs and they would sit on a bench. Of course, if you sit on the bench theres no way you will , read the plaque, its below your waist level. I will come back later to this later about marking these sites with sign so you do not have to go on a treasure hunt. If you cannot read it on the lower lefthand corner, the inscription is this area contains unmarked graves believed to be the slaves of the maury family. Another quick example before i move on in plain sight. I do not know if anyone recognizes this site. This is the Slave Cemetery at monticello. If any of you know who have visited monticello, World Heritage site, the Slave Cemetery they have located so far, which i am sure is just one of many, is located in the middle of the parking lot. This was an unfortunate it was relocated decades ago after they had made the parking lot. If you are visiting monticello leave,sure before you get out of your car, and they have a very nice walkway that takes you to the cemetery. So, you found the cemetery and to find a cemetery, you have to know what these gravestones might look like. There is a tremendous amount of variability in these historic africanamerican gravestones. This is one of the reasons it is interesting. It is not just a testament to wards attitudes towards death or religious beliefs, its also a testament to the art history of these communities the last 200 years. This is a stone it is carved, i know its hard to see in my betsy,aph it says the stone of an enslaved woman on a plantation. Although i dont have time today to go through all the stone variability but i am happy to answer questions afterwards from left to right, i want to highlight that on the lefthand side, these little metal markers , they were the bane of my existence when i started this project because i did not know what they were. Visitedthe cemeteries i initially had dozens and dozens of these stones. Locally available field stones. I would get to these metal markers and suddenly i thought i could read something, i thought there were numbers on it. The first couple dozen of these i found, i wrote down all those numbers. I will tell you, if you do this, dont bother, thats the patent number. [laughter] ms. Rainville these markers, invented around the early 20th century, they are used like funeral homes. Had known more i about modern funeral practices, i could have cut to the chase. These are provided by the funeral home. They are meant to be temporary before you buy whatever the gravestone will be. But in many cases, especially with poorer families or families that moved soon after a test they never get around to , replacing the markers. So the marker remains. As you can tell from this photo, unfortunately markers because , they are meant to be temporary usually the inscription is either on a piece of paper under glass, sometimes little metal letters fall out and you get one of these and you see these letters strewn that have fallen now down below and you have to figure out where they go. But that number, thats not a helpful number. Otherwise, these stones, for example the obelisks in the , center, these are hand carved stones. The anthropomorphic image in the center. A beautiful carving. And then the marble stone says faithful servant. It may be hard to tell the scale that is an oldfashioned gps on the lower righthand corner for scale, which is roughly five times the size of an iphone. But this small marble marker was in the plot of a white family who owned a school for girls in the 19th century in charlottesville. In this plot, in one of the old, public cemeteires in charlottesville, you have members of the mead family and then this one here. Youll notice that there is no last name for haga, though it turns out she died decades after the end of slavery. She had a last name and the family buried by herself in the plot of the white family. This is another issue of paternalism, when africanamericans who were formally enslaved are sometimes , after death buried in a white , family plot. While there are arguably pros and cons to that, one of the drawbacks, the negatives, it is very hard now to figure out the rest of her own family and where they are buried. Theyre definitely not buried in this White Cemetery. Image, this is a more contemporary stone in a modern africanamerican cemetery. This is a closeup of one of the funeral hoe markers. The only thing that i can tell you if you find him is look very carefully. At first glance, they often look like they are completely illegible. In this case this is someone who died in 1917. So this crazy piece of paper underneath glass, exposed to the elements, survived years. But i am sure that will not survive much longer, so make sure you please do record inscriptions if you find any of these. As i mentioned in the slave graveyards, very often, these stones are not inscribed, but in about 5 of the cases, they are in they can be hard to read. This one says callie or sally. The second line, even harder to read, says july 10 or 16th, 1865. Either this woman died a couple of months after the end of war, she is buried this location is on a plantation cemetery in albemarle. And i like to always remind people that if an enslaved person lived after emancipation and died in the 1890s, they still might decide to be buried on a slave cemeteries, though they may not be enslaved, because their spouse was buried there or their parents, their children. It is aboutat freedom it very much has to do , with family connection. Decisions of which family members to buried together. Slave gravestones can be remarkably variable in shape and size. On the lefthand side, you will notice this is the pattern we saw before. Out the stone before carving the inscription. In the middle is a fascinating inscription i wish i could interpret. It has a combination of geometric forms and letters. On the righthand side, while not inscribed, it has been shaped into that curved obelisk shaped. In other times these are slightly later stones in reconstruction era cemeteries in black churches in the 1870s. The dove, a common mortuary symbol, rosetts, and the heart itself. You will notice that in pretty much all 20thcentury american cemeteries, where you start getting these euphemistic inscriptions at rest, sleeping with jeses, something other than they are dead and buried. It can be a project to clean up a cemetery. In the case of a historic africanamerican cemetery, you have to be careful what you are cleaning. These are gray side offerings. These are deliberately from the crockery, the plates, the these things are deliberately placed on top of the grave. So you do have be careful you clean. Sometimes the gravestones are not stones at all but they are trees or something planted here which is hardest from an anthropological or archaeological perspective. It makes it hard to reconstruct who planted it and why. Planted next to the cross the reason i know this is because i did oral interviews with neighbors, this is planted in the honor of someones father who died. In the center, this might even be a rose bush that was deliberately planted in front of a stone and is now taking over. Which is why i encourage people, if you go into old cemeteries and see a rose bush or a hedge, get down and look in the middle of it and see if theres something there. Usually planted bushes in cemeteries started out like this. As an innocent, small planting, and they just took over. And on the far right, this is one of the markers i mentioned with the letters that slide half , of which have fallen out. Someone has taken a tree stop and stuck it because the metal marker intern off its base combined the metal marker with a , tree stump. There are all different ways to do this. Sometimes it is even more obscure. On the lefthand side, you have the metal markers. In this case, you can clearly see the glass was broken and the paper was not legible at all. In addition, someone has been planting tulips, daffodils and the colorful flowers are fake. I was never a fan of plastic flowers before i started this project, because if all else fails, that plastic will be there for another few thousand years. Even if nothing else is left, if you put the plastic flowers and secure them in the ground, that will tell people there was a burial here. On the righthand side, in most cases, especially in the past when people are buried before , modernday restrictions on them faults and all sorts of crazy things if you were buried the a wooden box, you and box would decay with time. Depression will occur. Oddly enough, in american culture, sometimes by the mid to late 20th century, this became depressions in cemeteries became an eyesore. Modernday cemeteries require all sorts of circumventions to make sure that depressions do not occur. But in any old cemetery, since its a natural process, youll find it depressions and this is sometimes your guide for a burial location where the stone no longer remains or the stone was something wood. The very best time to find these depressions is in the fall, the leaves will settle into these depressions, or right after a snowfall. So, you have found your cemetery and you have recorded some of the stones. Now what is it that you can , learn from these gravestones . As any genealogist will know, cemeteries contain information about birth and death. Far more than that, the distribution or placement of stones within the cemetery very often give you the real estate meant of the real estate of the dead, figure out the connection between individuals, whether neighbors or a cane. Heres something as significant as the nickname, but i did not notice taking this picture when i took the picture which is very picture. N the i tend to go into a particular frame of mind in these cemeteries is that im really not paying attention to anything other than trying to get the photograph. Afterward, i will look in the picture, and half the time, i can see there is poison ivy going, there are ticks, there was a snake once or twice, but i did not notice that at the time, which will probably for the best. In other cases, its just plain remarkable. This woman, ruth fitch, a mother of 19 children, and sure enough , around her burial are most of those 19 children and, of course, subsequent generations. In other cases, cemeteries and the epitaphs can tell about peoples occupations, their status. In the case of formerly enslaved individuals it can be a rare , link to where they were enslaved. On the lefthand side, charles but whened in 1917, you do the math on his epitaph, you can clearly see he was enslaved. This was in a neighborhood Burial Ground near to a plantation called steubenville. The inscription reads that he spent his life of 80 years in faithful service to the family. You can probably guess who probably paid for the stone. On the righthand side, those of you who were here a couple of weeks ago, when Barkley Reeves spoke, descendent of thomas hill, a week or two ago one of the descendents of the enslaved community is doing a film about his family. This is one of his descendents, colin byrd. Colin was also enslaved and that inscription is much harder to read, but it says after his name and his death, well done, good and faithful servant. This is the only inscribed stone in that Slave Cemetery. These slave graveyards can be very informative. As many of you know who have tried to do africanamerican genealogy, for individuals born prior to freedom, if they had been enslaved, you know that it is hard to make the connection from the 1870 census to where people were enslaved and their full name. So, another piece of information is, of course, military service. The government does provide gravestones, free of charge, to individuals who served in the armed services. Here i have two world war i gravestones i picked world war i for a particular reason. These are both africanamerican veterans. In louisa county. One one in albemarle county. Sometimes these stones give about the unit a person served in, which is hard to obtain, because a lot of world war i Service Records burned in a fire back in the were beingre they stored. This is where i do a quick plug for my newest project based on these gravestones, which is based on these gravestones of military veterans. Of world war i memorials. Not just gravestones, but statues, plaque, bridges, and gymnasiums, in honor of the virginians who served in world war i. Much enjoy why very studying in cemeteries remiss if , i didnt conclude by talking about what isnt in the cemetery. What else would we like to know about africanamerican funerary rituals . One of the places to look is in 19th century art. In this lithograph, individuals, there is a coffin you can see at the end of the wagon, headed to a funeral. Scene, this iser an 1816 painting by a british man visiting new orleans. I have to emphasize this is a white perspective on a slave funeral. Have so fewwe photographs or paintings or depictions of black funerals in the antebellum period, it is still valuable to analyze. There is actually a lot going on in this picture. I will summarize by saying that you can see the coffin lowering being lowered into the ground in the bottom corner. An africanamerican preacher saying the service. This is significant, if you only read the laws and statutes at the time, you will learn the africanamerican church services, usually a white preacher had to be present. This was because of the fear of slave revolt. So it is actually fascinating to see an africanamerican preacher doing the service by himself. Will see more nerves mourners, and you notice there are 2 levels of mourners. One is most likely house servants, more welldressed and i am not in any way trying to imply that slavery was not a horrible institution but clearly , their status required them to have a different level of dress other individuals who were probably field hands. If you look closely in the woods, you will see a white Couple Holding hands. Those would be the owners of the plantation. It is a fascinating window from one persons perspective of what a funeral might have looked like in the antebellum period. In my book, i talk about the other aspects. The wake, the burial itself, the funeral, and the period of mourning after the burial of the individual. Unfortunately, many of these sites are at risk. It is one of the reasons i started so many cemeteries and cap studying them. It got to the point where it was hard to say no to someone who called and said i think there may be an old Black Cemetery, in you help though i think got better at saying no, in case you were thinking of asking after this talk. It is hard to say no, and of course there are lots of resources, not least of which would be the department of Historic Resources here in richmond to help family members or interested members of the community on how to protect these sites. Normally this is where i show handful of slides of my trials and tribulations of trying to protect cemeteries from developments, buildings, farmers with cows, going down the list. But being here in richmond, it would be remiss of me if i did not highlight some of the amazing projects that are ongoing in your community, which i have to say right now i personally have nothing to do with. I wish i could take credit. But i cannot, other than putting up a picture. These are not my projects, but there are lots of wonderful efforts. Richmond, in terms of communities in the states, believe it or not i know there are pros and cons around your historic black cemeteries here you are still leading the way in restoration projects. In the lower righthand corner, i have the website of this cleanup restoration group. Effort, a dayl recently when they were working to restore the cemetery. Tomorrow night, if you like to do more than one cemetery lecture a week, tomorrow night in virginia, there is a film showing of me et me in the bottom, a film showing by a local professor at vcu who has been studying and working on it for a long time, the african Burial Ground here in richmond, which has a tremendous amount of the controversy around it. And there is also a separate website, the url at the bottom, that documents both black and white cemeteries. If you were to click on this site, you could look at pictures of more than a dozen historic cemeteries. Lots of great work. The reason this is important is proactively know where these sites are located, pushne, often as new option comes, if you are building New Buildings beach, id New Buildings there, by the time you figure it out, it is too late. You can see in the background the houses going up. A developerouses bought land that used to be associated with a plantation. They had a very complicated site plan for where they would build. Years into this process, they realized that they were building these houses, and in the center, that white stuff is snow. This is the pattern i was talking about. Those are both burials. If you look really closely, youll see one of them has a stone and one of them has one of those rusted metal markers. This was an old Black Cemetery, predominantly the lewis family from the earlier 20th century. ,n africanamerican cemetery but the descendents had moved away around world war ii, so there is no one left in the community to raise a hand when this developer went in. Instead, they found it after they had started construction. The short version of the story is that after year or two of myself and other Community Members initially fighting to keep the cemetery in tact, it became obvious that if we left it there, it would basically be a road out. And the context because of where they were going to build the houses it would become someones backyard. After contacting the descendents , they made the very difficult decision to have the cemetery moved. Which is one of the options when vdot puts a road through an old site. They were relocated by an archaeologist, and then a funeral home moved the cemetery that was about half a mile away. Personally, i would rather see these things not moved if possible because when you move them, even if you try to did it as respectfully as possible, you lost that sense of the original community and where that community was located. As i mentioned, towards that side,n the righthand this is a Church Cemetery located in the very rural place far from the location of the church. It is connected to the slides i sure do earlier. Tips, it took me acting on quite a while to find the church. And it did involve hunting dogs and hunters themselves. After all of this effort, i worked with the church to put up a sign, but at least people knew what the site was when they found it. , in this day and age, or they decided to do with this information i collected is i created a website so that and it was ramin secured towards so that families could locate old barely aground. In this day and age, the modern equivalent is findagrave. Com, but at the time, that information was not readily available. So i set up this website. You click on the cemetery. You get a description of who is buried in the cemetery. And then on each stone, you can click and get information about the person buried there. It is very least, again, a great time to find old cemeteries because all the foliage is dying off. As you find it, taking photographs of the stones is so important because they do a road with time. They do do a road erode with time. Dontf course, if we share this information with people who are younger than most us reallyn if all of care about cemeteries and want to save them, if we dont teach the next generation where they should care about cemeteries and learn from cemeteries, then i feel that my job is not done. So i work with professors at the university of virginia with their students are getting their degrees in education who are going to go off in the trenches in the k12 classrooms and teach them how to integrate cemeteries and what we can learn from cemeteries into social studies, sciences, math, humanities. There is everything from poetry in a cemetery, you can count the late birth and death dates until you are blue in the face, and for those of you who are socially media savvy, i do try to share this information through a variety of sources through videos. For a long time, i had a blog that was a gravestone a week to encourage these people that the cemeteries are more than a place of sadness, but they are also an Outdoor Museum of cultural traditions. I have a collection of gravestones from cemeteries in part to try to reach out to Community Members to help me interpret what the symbols mean. And then instagram, full disclosure, i dont do instagram, but other people do. Instagram is a great way to share photographs and raise awareness about these sites. Well, that is strange. That has been this thing well, i will leave it here. But the last slide was there we go. The last slide was mentioning that the book that paul mentioned at the beginning, which is available after the talk, but i always like to remind people that if you can buy the book, that is great. If you can buy it for you and 12 of your friends for christmas, that is even better. But if you cant, the one thing i always encourage people or if you get on a gift for at some point, to give it to your local library. The most important thing to me is that Young Students who are going to do a book report, a paper, whatever kids have to do in this day and age in k12 classrooms, that they can freely and easily access this book. The beautiful thing about cemeteries is that every Single Community as a cemetery. Have tonsrginia, we of African American cemeteries that have not been studied or documented. It is a great way to learn about local history. If you find my book, in a used book so, grab it out and give it to your local library. I would appreciate it. I will be happy to take questions. [applause] clearly, cemeteries are a treasure trove of history. But a comment you had mentioned the east end cemetery, and there is a lecture next week at the university of richmond end. T the work at east propertydly, if a owner discovers there is a cemetery on it, what are the restrictions and the impact on Property Value on that Property Owner . Ms. Rainville first, for that lecture, please do visit it. Blog on wordpress. For your second question, technically i mean, there is no onetoone correlation to a cemetery equals minus or plus such and such percentage of the worth of the property. Some of us would see it as a net increase, but in terms of restrictions, there are about 12 legale in the virginian statutes that apply to cemetery. And that will restrict what you can and cannot do. The bottom line is you cannot disturb human remains and you cannot deface gravestones. The simplest way to say it is that you just cant disturb or destroy anything in the cemetery , but it becomes a great area, for example, if you have a cemetery under property and there was never a fence, so you arent doing anything to it, but lets say you have horses or cows and occasionally they are doing damage, it would certainly be a great area if someone came forward and said, well, this is your fault, you must do something. That i would have to turn over to a lawyer. The general thumb is that you cannot actively disturb or destroy a cemetery. The other side of the corn is one of the restrictions on where to put a cemetery. And there there are very specific restrictions on how far away from a water source and you have to own at least two acres. I cut and pasted out of the virginia statutes of the ones that apply to cemeteries and graveyards. Informationve any about the holland Park Cemetery . Ms. Rainville no, im afraid. Is there a particular question you have, a concern you have about it . Or [indiscernible] do you know where it is located . Ms. Rainville so, no, but i can answer that question more broadly. If you are looking for an old cemetery, the best places to start would be a local Historical Society or the local courthouse because at some point, even if it is a very old cemetery care me cemetery, the Vital Statistics was created in virginia and a death certificate was required for each death. And on the death certificate, you are supposed to indicate the place of burial. Look to try and find the death certificate. Historicalal society, or any institution that has been around for 100 plus years. And then you can start looking at old maps, like old topographic maps. They may not name the cemetery, but it is a good place to start. We have one right here. Yes, maam. Excuse me. I have been looking in some of the old deeds for farms. My family has a couple of farms. And i have noticed a pattern. I dont know if this is a pattern or just something i have noticed, but it seems like an a lot of the cases of the white cemeteries, it is actually in the deed when that family sold the farm to somebody else that they sold the whole farm except for that little cemetery. But if there is a Black Cemetery on the farm, it never mentions it. Ms. Rainville there is no rhyme or reason for either white or black cemeteries. Up until recently, it was not legally required to put a cemetery on a date. In other words, it is usually because the person who drew up the deed was the original order or the person whose cemetery it is. Today, the laws have changed. Now, for example, any surveyor could survey a couple acres. If they see a cemetery, even though they havent been able to find it, they are legally required to report the location of that cemetery. But that didnt used to be the case. Knowin places where we that there is a 200yearold wet cemetery, unfortunately it is kind of a crapshoot on whether or not that cemetery is on the deed. Now today because everything is so expensive, even if the wellmeaning landowner finds a cemetery but it is not on the deed, if they want to get it on the deed they have to pay money to get it resurveyed and put onto the deed. For black cemeteries in the 19th century, everything has to do with access to money, resources. It is far less likely that, say, an africanamerican family, unless they are wealthy in 1880, they were able to have their land surveyed and paid to get the cemetery indicated on the d. But it is also worth looking at deeds. Conversely, just because you find a deed and doesnt list the cemetery, that doesnt mean anything. The case of the plantation i was talking about in charlottesville, there are four other cemeteries that that developer that was on the land the developer bought. Two are slaves and two are historic black cemeteries. None of them are on any deed anywhere. They would have actually had to look for it. We have one right here. My question is if you are walking way in the woods and i think i found something pretty remote, is there a repository for this information . Some entity i should notify . Ms. Rainville yes. And i am so happy to say that the person who is partly responsible for the entity is with us. Joline smith. Yes, the state Historic Preservation office at the department of Historic Resources , or an of the many, many duties that our tax dollars are supporting and the wonderful things the dhr does, and it is not that i can promise there is one of joline and a handful of other archaeologists, so they can come out to every cemetery and do research and math, but they have a variety of databases that record information about where the cemeteries are located. The other place you should reach out to asia local planning department. Localch out to is your planning department. Anyone who is going to build something in this day and age is going to have to get through a building permit. Have Geographic Information where they keep track of features. And when future is, of course, cemeteries. One final question . Yes, i have one question. I have an old Family Cemetery that is basically what it. And a lot of the headstones are missing. I thought maybe they had fallen into the grave itself, but we havent had any luck. What is the best way to try and preserve Something Like that . We can get rid of the underbrush. The trees that are there, they are pretty deeply rooted. Ms. Rainville three things about that. One is that you are absolutely right that sometimes headstones because headstones are placed at the edge, sometimes they fall into the burial shaft. If that happens 50, 100 years , it some of the least decay is underground. I promise you you are nowhere near the body. You are feet above any human remains. This is not about bobbing for bodies. It is that if a stone has fallen over, i like to reassure everyone because we are in the halloween season, but if the stone has fallen over, it would be well worth it because maybe it isnt god. The second thing is there is no easy answer for how to mark an unmarked burial. As much as i hate to say it, one of the most longlasting things you can do is like a tall plastic cross. Because plastic is going to last for a really long time. One of the longest lasting affordable things to do because, of course, the luxury model here would be if you paid for new Granite Stone to place them at the head. You may or may not know who is buried where, but maybe you could put the family name. But as im sure as most of you realize, it gets very expensive. Granite is what you would want to go for, not to marvel. Marble. There is no one easy way other than either a granite marker or some sort of a plastic marker that will be sturdy and last for a long time to mark where those burials are. [applause] [indistinct chatter] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] weekend onthis cspans cities tour, we will explore the history and literary life of californias capital city, sacramento. And on