You Should Be Photographing Old Cemeteries Before They Disappear Forever

 There is a cemetery in Aiken County South Carolina that has headstones dating back to before the Civil War. Some of them are so weathered you can barely read the names. A few of them have already become unreadable. And nobody has been out there in years to document what is left.

That cemetery is not unusual. There are thousands like it across this country.

What Is in Those Cemeteries

Old cemeteries are one of the richest sources of historical information that exists for ordinary people.

A headstone tells you a name. A birth date. A death date. Sometimes a relationship. Sometimes an occupation or a cause of death or a brief description of who the person was. All of that is historical information that exists nowhere else for many of the people buried there.

Family cemeteries on old farmland often contain multiple generations of a single family. Church cemeteries contain the history of entire communities going back as far as the congregation existed. Municipal cemeteries contain the records of everyone who died in a place over generations, including people who left no other documentation behind.

Why They Are Disappearing

Many old cemeteries are on private land that has changed hands multiple times. The current owner may not even know the cemetery is there. Or they may know and not care about maintaining it. Or they may be planning to sell the land for development.

Wooden grave markers rot away in a few decades. Stone markers crack and weather until the inscriptions become unreadable. Without someone to maintain the vegetation around them, headstones get covered by brush and eventually buried.

In some cases cemeteries have literally been paved over. Highways and parking lots and developments built without anyone bothering to check what was there before.

What You Can Do

Go out to old cemeteries in your area and photograph every headstone you can read. You do not need special equipment. Your phone camera is sufficient.

Upload your photographs to Find A Grave at findagrave.com or BillionGraves at billiongraves.com. Both of these sites are free and allow volunteers to add photographs and transcriptions of headstone information. What you upload becomes part of a permanent searchable database that genealogists and historians around the world can access.

If you find a cemetery that is overgrown, contact your local county historical society. Many areas have volunteer cemetery restoration groups who will come out and help clean up and document a neglected site.

If you find evidence of a cemetery that has been destroyed or built over, document what you know and report it to your state historic preservation office. Many states have laws protecting burial sites even when they are on private land.

Those names deserve to be in the record. All it takes is someone willing to go out there and write them down.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Difference Between What the News Reports and What Actually Happened

 In 1968 sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee went on strike. They were mostly Black men doing dangerous dirty work for poverty wages with no benefits and no protections. Two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck and the city had done nothing.

The strike lasted 65 days. It was one of the most significant labor actions of the civil rights era. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the strikers and was assassinated there.

The news coverage at the time focused heavily on the violence and disruption of the protests. On the National Guard presence. On the property damage. Much less on the actual conditions the workers were striking against or the economic system that had produced those conditions.

The news told one story. History tells a fuller one.

Why News Coverage Is Not the Same as History

News is written in real time with incomplete information. Reporters are working fast, often without full context, trying to describe something that is still unfolding. What they produce is a first draft of history. A useful one. But a draft.

News coverage is shaped by what editors decide is interesting to their audience. Conflict is interesting. Drama is interesting. The slow grinding reality of poverty or injustice or institutional failure is less interesting to cover day by day, even when it is more important.

News coverage is also shaped by access. Reporters cover what they can get to and who will talk to them. Official sources have press offices and spokespeople who know how to get their version of events into the record. Ordinary people and poor communities do not have those resources.

The result is a record that is skewed toward official perspectives, dramatic moments and conflict, and away from context, root causes and the experiences of ordinary people.

How to Read the News as a Historical Document

When you read news coverage of a current event, ask what is not being covered. What is the background to this story that the article does not explain. Who are the people most affected by this and are they being quoted. What would this story look like if it were told from a different perspective.

Save primary sources when you can. Photographs. Documents. Firsthand accounts from people directly involved. These are the materials that historians will rely on when they try to understand this moment fifty years from now.

Write your own account of things you witness. You are a primary source. Your perspective on what is happening around you is exactly what future historians will wish they had more of.

The news gives you the first draft. You can help write a better one.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Poor Neighborhoods Never Make the History Books Even When Big Things Happen There

 In 1921 a thriving Black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma was destroyed by a mob. Buildings burned. People killed. A prosperous community that had been called Black Wall Street was reduced to rubble over two days.

For decades this event barely appeared in any history book. It was not widely taught in schools. Many people in Tulsa grew up not knowing it had happened. It took until 1996 for an official state commission to formally investigate the massacre and until 2021 for it to receive widespread national attention.

An entire community was destroyed. And history looked away for a hundred years.

This is not just one story.

Why Poor Neighborhoods Get Ignored

Wealthy neighborhoods and wealthy institutions generate records. They have lawyers and accountants and archivists and PR people. They have the resources to document themselves and the connections to get their stories into the papers and the history books.

Poor neighborhoods do not have those resources. Their stories depend on someone outside the community deciding to document them, or on community members doing the work themselves with no institutional support.

When something happens in a poor neighborhood, a protest, a disaster, a crime wave, a community effort, the coverage tends to focus on the event itself. Not on the history of the community. Not on the people who live there. Not on what came before or what the place means to the people who call it home.

And when the event is over the cameras leave and the neighborhood goes back to being invisible to the people who write official history.

What That Means for the Record

It means that the history of poverty in America is almost invisible in official accounts. We have detailed histories of the decisions made in Washington about economic policy. We have almost no documented record of what it was actually like to live through those policies in the communities they affected.

It means that community organizations, mutual aid networks, local leaders and everyday acts of survival and resistance that happen in poor neighborhoods every single day are going unrecorded.

It means that the people doing the most important work of keeping communities together under the hardest conditions are doing that work without anyone writing it down.

What You Can Do

If you live in or grew up in a community that does not have a written history, you can start one. A blog. A Facebook page. A collection of photographs with captions. A series of interviews with longtime residents. It does not have to be formal or polished. It just has to exist somewhere.

If you know people who have lived through things worth documenting, ask them to tell you about it. Record it. Write it down.

If you see community organizations doing important work in your area, document what they do. Put names to the people involved. Describe what the work actually looks like day to day.

The Tulsa massacre survived in memory because community members refused to forget it even when the official record ignored it. That is the power ordinary people have. The power to refuse to let things disappear.

Use it.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.