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Biography of a Graveyard 

Back in 2001 I had just published a book and had no projects on my plate.  I decided to use part of my summer to create an inventory of all of the gravestones in my home town graveyard.  This is Horse Prairie graveyard in Sesser, Illinois about 500 miles south of Detroit.  It is a very lovely graveyard, surrounded by farmland and rolling hills.  It is where many of my relatives are buried  -- grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and now parents.  I also have a gravestone there waiting for my arrival.  

When I got back home my wife noticed that I had birth and death dates from most of those stones and could easily create an Excel  spreadsheet that would help me detect patterns. 

 Indeed!  

That was what I did.  In the end I produced three publications from this project, one in an academic journal, one in a collection of writings on how professors do research, and one a full book on everything I learned about these people and their history. 

What I learned covered history, culture, religion, personal stories, mortality, gender differences, age differences, disease and inoculation,  human tragedy, and so much more. 

I also learned what every researcher learns, that many of your beginning assumptions are wrong.  

 I think you will enjoy this. 

Two Notes 

Jane was invaluable in this project.  After I had  typed up a draft of everything I had recorded from the gravestones,  she returned with me to walk the graveyard and to go through the stones one last time, stone by stone, to make sure I had all the facts and inscriptions correct. 

Not only is she a very precise person but she has an amazing ability to read faded stones. 

And a slightly sad update:  My collaborator on this project, Clara Crocker Brown, died in mid-2021.  She was just a couple of weeks short of 100 years of age.  She died at home.   She came to our town when she was a little girl and married a local man but she always felt she was new.  Still, she devoted many years of her life to walking graveyards and recording the information that she found.  So much that she found would have been lost had she not done what she did.  

There are many good things in life that will never get done unless someone says, "If nobody else is going to do this, I will do it myself."  

She was a remarkable woman.