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SITE OF THE WEEK

Now here's a great idea -- how about a web for dead people? What if you gave a free web page to every single person who is buried in New England? THink about it for a minute,if you dare.

VISIT A Very Grave Matter web site

Our dear departed are leaving us again. This time it’s their gravestones that are disappearing – battered and broken and fallen and stolen. And with the lost ancient slate and granite headstones, many times, go the last historic records of their owners’ time on Earth. In New England, especially along the coastline where the earliest Europeans settled, the situation is critical.

"I’m trying to take pictures of them now, before they’re gone," says Jenn Marcelais of Portsmouth. "I’ve got pictures I took last year, and this year the tomb stone is flat on the ground. It’s scary."

Jenn’s two-year old web site, GraveMatter.com, now includes photographs of 3,000 headstones in cemeteries from Salem, Massachusetts to York, Maine. Her project began, for obvious reasons, outside her own Portsmouth home.

"I live next door to the North Cemetery. You can’t look out any window on one side of my house without seeing gravestones. I’ve seen the bad shape it’s in."

Jenn says she always had a fondness for cemeteries. She grew up in Amesbury, MA where she frequently visited a peaceful cemetery near the Mary Baker Eddy Museum. Later she began searching for the graves of her ancestors.

"I did genealogy for awhile for my family, and I hate to say it, but I didn’t have many interesting family members. They were mostly farmers."

Two years ago Jenn discovered the famous locals like Declaration-signer William Whipple, and first NH Governor John Langdon resting just a few yards from her house. She began visiting the battered graves and reading the markers. She jotted down names and looked them up on the Internet, names like Hall Jackson who discovered a cure for dropsy and treated the wounded at Bunker Hill.

Then she got a new digital camera and the photo sessions began. Instead of taking a few shots of the most interesting graves, Jenn decided to keep a record of every grave stone dating back from the 1860s. One cemetery led to another, and another.

Jenn Marcelais also builds web sites. It was not long before she began posting the tomb stone photographs and epitaphs online. At first it was a way to showcase her new company Soul Oyster Web Design. Pretty soon, it was an obsession. She and her husband share a home office where he runs Blue Neo, a computer networking company.

"My husband used to listen to my stories of the places I went," she says. "Now I’m pretty much in my own world."

The web site is study of soft blue and gold, broken only by pictures of gray stones. The large format photos allow researchers to see tombs almost as clearly as if they were at the cemetery. Separate gallery pages highlight Jenn’s favorite epitaphs and the most ornate stone carvings. She keeps an online log of her travels and points out cemeteries in severe distress. She lists the oldest stones chronologically and highlights dead people she finds to be most interesting.

Amazingly, the webmaster has not found time to database the site. Every page is hand coded and cross referenced in html. The bigger the site gets, the more ponderous the transfer to a database will be, but Jenn is propelled forward by the sheer number of cemeteries left to document an the speed at which the tombs are falling. Not a scholar by trade, Jenn learns as she works.

"I never expected it to get this big, " she says. "I honestly don’t know that much about the carvings. People email me and ask to see a cemetery online, and sometimes I go there. Right now, I’m concerned about Old Hill Cemetery in Newburyport. More and more headstones there are toppled over, mostly because of groundhogs digging holes."

Currently the site brings in no income other than a few business referrals and the sale of a few history-related books. Jenn hosts the site herself on a chunk of server space she uses for customers. The greatest thrill, she says, comes from a constant flow of readers who are happy with her volunteer effort.

"Thank you so much," a reader emailed her recently from the West Coast. "I’ve never been able to see my ancestors gravestones. And now I can."

Some day, I predict, every tomb stone in America will be accessible via the Internet. Towns like Hampton, NH are already there. Researchers at the Lane Memorial Library transferred all the written records to their historic cemeteries online years ago. By providing large 800-dpi images, Jenn’s photo work on A Very Grave Matter takes the process all the way. When possible she adds historical information or links to web pages with more info on the deceased.

While Jenn has not yet discovered a way to make her hobby pay, I think she may be on to something here. Most financially successful web sites are formed around a simple principal – collect and database focused information that cannot easily be obtained elsewhere. The bigger and more effective the database, the more valuable the resource. Ebay.com is little more than a big flea market. WebMD.com is a medical encyclopedia. Amazon.com began as a massive bookstore.

A Very Grave Matter has something to sell. If it eventually contains every cemetery in New England (and there are thousands) it could centralize a record keeping nightmare. Cemetery records are scattered in old church and synagogue basements, in town archives and in the files of private cemetery operators. Local libraries often have typed collections of obituaries culled from local newspapers. No simple centralized system exists for tracking the ancient dead. The Mormom site Ancestry.com is the ultimate genealogy web site now, and there are many fractured and specialized databases. Find-a-Grave (www.findagrave.com) began with celebrity tombs and is growing. PoliticalGraveyard.com tracks politicians of old. Jenn is found of SavingGraves.org that drives home the message that local history is lost each time a tombstone disappears.

Getting paid for working hard requires following the money trail. In this case, genealogy researchers are likely not the pot of gold. Towns, churches and historical societies are notoriously poor. It is their poverty, in fact, that has allowed our historic cemeteries to deteriorate so badly. So who pays the tab as Jenn Marcelais photographs our rapidly fading heritage? I suggest a two-tiered approach.

Start with the people who have the most to gain by saving local cemeteries. That’s right – funeral homes. They make their living burying us. It is a growth industry in the Baby Boom era with a captive community of eventual consumers. Funeral directors have the money and there are precious few places where they can advertise tastefully. More and more, our local funeral homes are owned by large chain companies. They need to maintain their small neighborhood cache, especially as more consumers opt for cremation and memorial services over the costly caskets and funerals. These people NEED to make a statement about their abiding interest in preserving town cemeteries and Jenn has the perfect use for their dollars.

I think, eventually, A Very Grave Matter should become a nonprofit agency, or at least allied with one. Once the funeral homes pay Jenn to digitally record and database the key cemeteries, there will still be hundreds of small family plots and historic graveyards to fill in. The more complete the database becomes, the more incentive there is for corporate, town and historical societies to help expand the archive. Jenn says volunteers are already sending her genealogical info and tomb pictures. Every town has its cemetery fans who can help. I know, I’m one. The site is a natural portal for people who want to help restore the grave markers in their own community.

Imagine the value of a unified online New England archive, Jenn says. Historians could do cross-sectional studies by age, sex, location and time period. Patterns in the spread of disease, or war or infant mortality could quickly be accomplished. Once the past has been documented through the 1860s, A Very Grave Matter could move upwards in time. Eventually, we could all take our place on the web site.

Okay, maybe I am running a little ahead of the game here. This is after, all, Jenn’s hobby. But the pictures are fascinating and the data is intriguing. Somebody is going to build this killer portal someday. That will require much pick and shovel word. Jenn already has a headstone start.

For more dead issues see THE GRAVE SITE