A Grave Undertaking

From the Mercy High School Interact Club

The Mercy High School Rotary Interact Club (Middletown Rotary’s sponsored service club for young people ages 14-18) wishes to invite anyone from the community to participate in a cemetery documentation project that the Interact Club is undertaking (pardon the pun) as a community service project in collaboration with the Old Burying Association, Godfrey Library, and members of the Middlesex County Historical Society, and the Middletown Rotary Club. 

 

This project involves finding and photographing the headstones in Mortimer Cemetery, the second oldest cemetery in Middletown.  This is a very old and fragile cemetery and this is the first time it is being photographed.  The last census of headstones occurred in 1934.  Since then, many of the stones are gone missing or are illegible and more of the carvings will disappear after this winter's freeze and thaw cycles; the face of stones sometimes just sheer off due to water seeping into the grain of the stone and freezing.  If the cemetery is not surveyed and photographed now, many burial locations and beautifully carved headstones and information will be lost forever.    

 

The reason why the Mercy students are doing this community service project is multi-fold.  First, the students are documenting what remains.  They want to record history before it disappears including the names, dates, art, and symbols on the headstones.  These are very old headstones, some dating from the early 1700s, and they are literally historic artifacts representing a culture and a society that has come and gone.  Many of the headstones are expertly carved, like a work of art and the choices of funerary symbols etched into the stones are very personal, telling the stories of the people who are buried there.  The students can also see how religious views have changed over time, giving a new understanding of our culture’s evolving spirituality.  Like archeologists, the students can discover what has been forgotten.  Like anthropologists, they can interpret what the findings. 

 

Second, burial locations are an essential resource for people who are researching their families’ histories.  The photographs and information will be held in the archives of Godfrey Library, a regional library focusing on ancestral research.  The students also plan to create a website about the project to help people find out more about their ancestors and to encourage others to save the history in cemeteries their own communities.  In this way, the project creates new genealogical data and research. 

 

Finally, visiting a grave is a way of keeping the memory of someone alive.  The Interact Club believes that it is important humanitarian effort to remember the people and the burial locations of those who have come before us because it makes us more alive and more human. It does not matter that we are remembering people whom we have never met, or people whom we are not related to.  The project honors the life of ordinary people, just like us, and it gives hope to know that like them, we too might be remembered someday.  It connects us to our own humanity.

 

Volunteers work in pairs; one photographs as the other finds the stones listed on the 1934 Hale survey and takes present-condition notes. Volunteers with acceptable quality digital cameras are asked to bring them, along with pencils and a snack or beverage.  We usually work for 2 hours a session in teams.  All volunteers on the project will be documented and photographed themselves, as official members of the Documentation Team. 

 

We meet at the front gate of Mortimer Cemetery, next to the Middletown Roller Rink and It's Only Natural Market near the intersection of Main Street and Liberty Streets in Middletown. For more information on the date of our next field work session, contact Cathy at 860 659 7118 or catbranch@comcast.net.