Black Church Cemeteries Restoration & Identification
By: Harold Thompson
Apr 5, 2024
The Featured Projects series focuses on historic preservation projects focused on preserving Black history throughout SC. Each project is asked to respond to four prompts. We hope this series helps bring awareness to the stunning number and variety of preservation projects being undertaken across the state, highlights the dedication of our community leaders, and inspires future generations of projects.
Want to feature your preservation project? Send us an email here.
| Provide a brief summary of your project, making sure to include why it’s important for African American historic preservation. |
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| Restoring Black Cemeteries is a passion project and another way to explore not only my genealogy but also assist others in learning about their family lineage. We focus on recovering headstones and emplacing missing headstones. |
| What motivated you/your community/your team to begin this project? |
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| We have seen individuals that cannot afford headstones/gravestones or afford to maintain them once they are emplaced. This is one way we can assist a family and ensure their family member is honored. My involvement in this project is ongoing in an advisory capacity and hands on when required. Key factors in preserving gravestones include:Explaining how to safely clean and preserve gravestones both granite and marble. Make sure to use certain chemicals that are environmentally friendly.Making sure that gravesites are marked with names, dates, location are preserved and kept in some type of ledger.I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure names and dates are correct. |
| What challenges have you faced in this project? |
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| The challenges faced are getting others to step up if we are to continue to preserve our history, legacy…etc. So much history has gotten away from us by not paying attention to detail. |
| How have you solved problems and found solutions? What advice would you give to others doing this kind of work? |
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| Make sure to do your research – ensuring that names and dates are correct, verifying information in multiple ways (family history, documents, etc), and knowing information about the specific cemeteries and graveyards themselves (for eg, are they connected to an active church or a no longer existing church, etc). Use FindaGrave.com to help find people you are looking for and for cemeteries that might be neglected or forgotten about. Create a volunteer group that has regular meetings and “work days” who go out to the cemetery to maintain the plots, markers, and landscapes. Apply for a State Historical Marker to document the site of the cemetery. |
| For more…. |
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| Thompson Monument Co.P.O. Box 44Union SC 29379thompsonharold63@gmail.comhttps://www.thompsonmonument.com/ 864-441-4404 |