FREDERICTON The City of Fredericton is working with experts to carefully restore and preserve the gravestones that make up the Old Loyalist Burial Ground in the city’s centre. Weather, vandalism and time have caused some of the stones to fall, crumble and sink into the ground, making most of their engravings illegible. Archaeologist and burial ground specialist Robyn Lacy has been contracted by the city to assess each stone and create a plan for how to delicately repair them. I’d say it’s very important, she said. Gravestones are part of everyone’s family histories, they tell us a lot about where a community came from. You can learn a lot about individual families and people as a whole.
By NSWCDD Corporate Communications
Think of your first mentor. It’s possible this individual still influences you.
“The web defines a mentorship as a relationship between two people where the individual with more experience, knowledge, and connections is able to pass along what they have learned to a more junior individual within a certain field. The more senior individual is the mentor, and the more junior individual is the mentee,” NSWCDD Technical Director John Fiore stated. “I agree with that definition, and I would add mentoring focuses on teaching. Mentoring is a careful consideration of another’s goals compared to their capability gaps and strategically working to find ways to close those gaps through experience, training and education. Mentoring requires we know something about each other.”
Posted: Mar 06, 2021 9:00 AM NT | Last Updated: March 6 comments
Black Cat Cemetery Preservation can conduct archeological surveys, map sites, evaluate structures and landscapes, and do all manner of restoration work on headstones.(Submitted by Robyn Lacy)
Cemeteries crammed with moss-covered monuments, crumbling headstones and worn-out benches are a common sight in Newfoundland, but they can often feel sombre and a world away from the traffic and rush of everyday life.
Folklorists and archaeologists, however, have an entirely different experience of these spaces and view burial sites as both living libraries and active laboratories.
Enter Robyn Lacy, a first-year PhD student in the archeology department at Memorial University, who, alongside her husband, has just launched a new company dedicated to cemetery preservation.