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Erin Toohey has become comfortable walking among the dead.
“Some days it’s a little unsettling to be out there. I’ve found the newer cemeteries are a little more unsettling because you know those people haven’t been gone that long, and they’re more active in people’s memories,” she says.
A senior at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, Toohey, 22, is working on the Historic Gravestone Project for the Lewes Historical Society. An archaeology major with a minor in anthropology, Toohey started in late May at Bethel Cemetery, moving gravestone to gravestone, recording detailed information about each.
She writes down inscriptions. She measures the stones. Notes the material of which it’s made. Records the direction it faces. Takes a digital photo and records the stone’s Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates.
“An intern last summer started working on Bethel Cemetery and I’ve finished it. I’ve worked on three others, Ebenezer on Cedar Grove Road, the black cemetery just off of Route 1 near Dewey Beach and the People’s Memorial Cemetery just off Route 1,” says Toohey.
Locating old graves
Toohey is the fourth intern to work on the project in four years. She’s the first to use ArchGIS computer software to plot the location of each grave. The new software makes it possible for Toohey and future researchers to integrate GPS and other data to create graphic depictions showing patterns in a cemetery’s growth.
“We can look at the spatial relationships between grave markers. We have aerial photography maps of Eastern Sussex County and we’re hoping to get those lined up so that you can see where a particular stone is,” says Toohey.
She says in Bethel Cemetery alone, the largest she’s studied, there are about 1,600 gravesites. A comparatively smaller cemetery, such as Ebenezer, has 180 plots.
Why the meticulous study of cemeteries? What can be learned from them?
Child deaths a mystery
“It’s a great resource for genealogists. Genealogy has become quite popular. This would make it easy for people who might say, ‘I think I had an ancestor in Lewes but I’m not sure,’ or ‘Are there any people there with my family name?’ They can have access to that information,” Toohey says. Historians can also look at birth and death years and study whether a possible public health crisis such as a flu epidemic hit the area.
Toohey said while working at Ebenezer Cemetery she noted about half of the gravesites were those of children. The observation piqued the investigative archaeologist in her.
“Is there a disproportionate amount of children represented in the cemetery, or perhaps in Lewes in general, compared to the rest of the United States at that time? It just kind of bolsters our knowledge of the past,” Toohey says.
Customs engraved in stones
She says the data gathered has provided a look at cemetery growth patterns, with St. Peter’s Cemetery density of gravesites providing an interesting chronology when viewed on a computer.
“The cemetery sort of grew around three separate churches. We’ve actually found a preliminary pattern. It started in the middle quadrant and then grew and kind of went around the church,” she says.
Changes over time in funerary customs can also be seen. The oldest grave marker found dates to 1707 in the cemetery on Pilottown Road across from the Devries Monument.
“I really enjoy the older stones. Those are the ones that tend to have more engravings, symbols, objects and epitaphs. They tend to be more personalized and moving, especially the ones for children,” she says.
Among notable epitaphs Toohey has seen on headstones: “I told you I was sick,” and “I’m still a little nervous about this trip.”
Toohey says a move toward more standardization and less individuality appears in headstones that are more recent. She said the change happened in the 1930s.
“They start to switch over to the ones you commonly see today, rectangular stones with just the name and the date of birth and death,” says Toohey.
Periods when certain types of stone were used – changing from limestone to marble then granite – can also be seen.
“I’m not sure that I’ve seen anything in granite that’s deeply personal. There are always exceptions but they’re a lot more cut-and-dried,” she says.
Data to be made public
Historical society member Russ Allen heads the research project. He says it will take at least two years and two more interns to finish gathering data. About two months of fieldwork remain.
“There’s Coolspring Cemetery and one in Rehoboth, those are the two big ones. We also want to do St. George’s Chapel and the Hazzard Cemetery,” says Allen. He says the last intern will work with the substantial quantity of information that will have been gathered.
“We’ll put some of the data to use either on a website or publish it. We’ve recorded close to 4,800 stones and lots and lots of names,” says Allen.
He says the ultimate goal is to make the project’s entire database, cross-referenced in a number of ways, available to the public through the internet and through computer records in the society’s library.
“There’s no shortage of ideas of what we can do with this,” says Allen.
The project is in part made possible by grants from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund based in Jacksonville, Fla. DuPont, who died in 1970, stipulated in her will that only those organizations which had received a philanthropic gift from her between Jan. 1, 1960, and Dec. 31, 1964, would be eligible for funding.
The cemetery project received $18,000 from the fund’s recent grant cycle. The fund provides $12 million to $18 million a year to more than 300 organizations.
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