Neglected and have few archival records regarding the burial. Ms. Rainville talks about how people can contribute to documenting these. [applause] ms. Rainville welcome today and thank you for coming on a lovely day. What i want to do in todays talk is take you through the process of locating old cemeteries, what you do when you find him, why they are important and what you can learn from , them. Very much a guidebook to these historic sites. I should say as a caveat, a lot of the rationale behind finding old cemeteries, while my research is focused on africanamerican cemeteries, very often pertains to white cemeteries and other cemeteries of the areas backgrounds. In terms of my research i , focused on the virginia piedmont, specifically areas in virginia, amherst county, nelson county. These are scientifically chosen. It had to do with where i lived and the counties i commuted to to go to work. [laughter] ms. Rainville it means if you are asking on counties not on that route, i will take a good guess. But within those counties, and albemarleem are in and amherst counties, that is where the 150 cemeteries are that i visited and studied for this research. On the map in the lower righthand corner do not worry, there will not be a quiz but the four digits you are looking at are the foundlings of these counties by european americans. I would also point out that if your interests are in native american Burial Grounds, those , of course, date back tens of thousands of years in virginia. Those were not the focus of my research. But, of course, in this region there are also hundreds and , hundreds of unmarked native burials as well. So, the chronology cemeteries, one of the most important things about cemeteries is they function as Outdoor Museums. While they are obviously a place mourning and loss, more broadly when you study the m more holistically you would quickly come to realize that you can read the gravestones and they provide insight into local history. It is like a reading not just family stories, but community stories. And then more broadly, these stories in my case the story of race in virginia in the last 200 years and racial relations. Towards the end, when i was selecting cemeteries to study i , always tried to look at gravestones distributed in different eras. Most notably, the antebellum area, which included slave communities and free blacks. And then reconstruction, the jim crow era, and finally the era of , migration for africanamerican families and continued segregation. Folks everyone that cemeteries once a cemetery was segregated, for example if it was segregated for the last 150 years you dont desegregate the cemetery. That always stays as a representation of a past era. You can integrate a cemetery moving forward, but it stays there. And in the case of a lot of Public Cemeteries in virginia, it stays there as a demarcation between white and black areas in Public Cemeteries. As i promised, i wanted to take you through some of the steps using some examples from my research of how you can locate these cemeteries. Because this is usually one of the most common questions i get. Again, sorry tools for finding historic cemeteries would apply to any old cemeteries. Like looking at old maps, asking older members of the community if they remember asking a , funeral home or a church. But in the case of africanamerican cemeteries, especially 19thcentury africanamerican cemeteries, sometimes these sites have overgrown and been forgotten. This example on the lefthand side, i am standing in the middle of a thicket. It is not just that cemeteries are overgrown, somehow they are always overgrown with things that are prickly. I dont know what it is about the state of virginia in prickly things. I have fought my way into the middle of a thicket and am actually standing next to a gravestone. Looking out, those are two of my students from sweet briar wondering if they are getting paid enough to come in and join me. This is a cemetery down in alta vista. This is one of the lynch family homes. This is a Slave Cemetery located about half a mile from the old big house. This is a common pattern with slave cemeteries. That they are located one quarter of a mile to half of a mile away from the Plantation House. Very often, the Plantation House will have a cemetery for the plantation owners much closer to the house. In this case, whats happened between the founding of the plantation and the Slave Cemetery is that the railroad went through in the 1850s and 1860s. So now, the Slave Cemetery you , drive on a road, you go up on the railroad tracks, and you get to a big, empty field and in the middle of the field is of this thicket. This is one of the clues of an old cemetery. Again, it could be a black or White Cemetery, but if you have a field that is otherwise crops are being planted, livestock is grazing, and then you have this suspicious cluster of trees or bushes, something that for some reason hasnt been taken down at some point, you always want to check that out first. We went and investigated and found the pattern on the right hand side. Which if you stop and think , about it for a moment, its very suspicious and not have all not at all what we were expecting to see. We have numbered each stone. We are the ones that added the flags. Of course, in a cemetery, while there are lots of different patterns, you always expect there to be spaces in between the stones because you need room for the bodies. In this case, the stones were clustered together and as it turns out, they were clustered together on two different trees on opposite sides of this thicket. When i asked more and looked into oral histories i was told , that in the 1950s a farmer who was grazing cattle in the area was disturbed because they kept tripping over gravestones, so he picked up the gravestones and moved them to either side to help his cows. This is not the only time people have told me that this had happened, though this was one of the more noticeable end result. Because nobody ever put the stones back. This, of course, is what we want to avoid. And one of the reasons why i encourage people you dont have to have a special training i will give you a badge if if you want it but i would encourage anyone to go back in your local communities and help locate these old sites so that they can be protected proactively before the stones are moved. So, in addition to these suspicious thickets or clusters of trees and otherwise cloud fields another pattern for old 19th or even 20th century cemeteries would be to look for the broader cultural context. By that i mean look for an old black school, old black churches. This is an example in albemarle county, the rose hill school. It has been close for many decades. It closed around the time of integration. It was formerly an africanamerican school. On the righthand side, the Rose Hill Church founded back in the 1880s, and this was a much more recent building. If you are looking for 19thcentury cemetery and you get to wayside, like i did, and see what is clearly a 20th Century Church made out of concrete blocks and think that this cannot be the right place, of course the wooden churches burned a lot and had all sorts of different troubles. So that in and of itself does not mean that you wont find an old and wonderful cemetery nearby. Indeed, this site had a cemetery with about 170 burials dating to the 19th century. The other pattern, especially for slave cemeteries is the one , that i was describing before. This is an aerial view from google maps of sweet briar. Many of you probably realize that Sweet Briar College was formerly a plantation. The college was founded by the will of a woman who died in 1900 and she herself was the daughter of a slave owner who had arrived from vermont in 1811. This, today our campus is the very center area, where the yellow square is. In the lower lefthand corner, that red circle, that would be the plantation owner cemetery where, for example, a large of fletcher and her daughter indiana, are buried. Indiana founded Sweet Briar College. The red triangle is where the Slave Cemetery is located. We know from records that in 1860 after elijah died, as his estate was being appraised, he owned over 145 individuals. And that Slave Cemetery has 60 remaining burials today. This is the pattern, especially for some we still have so many of the old 19th century plantations that are Still Standing. While all the land may not be intact, you can ignore modernday land boundaries and look for this sort of pattern if you are looking for an old, antebellum africanamerican cemetery. Another factor here is that both of these cemeteries white and black, are , located on hilltops. It was a common pattern to put any cemetery, even to this day, on a hilltop, for a variety of reasons, a symbolic and practical. You want to avoid the water table when you bury the dead and hilltop locations our one way to do that. If all else has failed and you have not found a cemetery on a map and dont have the pattern to look for, one of the most valuable assets would be Community Members. I was fortunate in my work. At least 30 of my leads came from people in the community. It can start with the vaguest of rumors, and in this particular instance, this was a librarian at the university of virginia. She wasnt from virginia. She had only been in her house for a couple of years. But someone in the neighborhood told her that they thought there was an old Black Cemetery in her backyard. Keep in mind, her backyard was many acres, so that didnt narrow it down. She had always been curious. You do this work and you quickly become the cemetery lady and the person that everyone calls one they are looking for these things. So, she called me up to asked if i would look for it and that was early on. I am doing this 15 years now. This was probably the second or third year and i was confident that i had a special gift at finding these things, so i said of course i will. So i go to her house and spent an hour or two with her german following me the whole time. Then i go back, and she said theres another thing that her neighbors had been telling her. Hern, the man in the center, had been living here a long time. When i want to talk to him, it turned out not only did he know, it was his Family Cemetery. So he came back with me and we traipsed around. In that case, it took about an and we were about to give up, hour. Going over the picture on the left this was not like hiking on a trail, there were fallen trees, groundhog pits. Just as we were able to give up, the sun was setting, that far picture of the gravestone, as the sun was setting that it lit up one of the stones. As is often the case in these old 19th century cemeteries, most of the stones look like this one. They were field stones. Regularly occurring stones that did not have an inscription. It wasnt that we were looking for a tall, white obelisk in the woods that would be easy to find. Mr. Herns, when we found this site, there were 12 burials here , and the only burial that had an inscription that we could read was for a little girl named marian. When i read it out loud, you had to crouch down, that was a metal marker he said that that was his , sister and that her burial, back in the 1920s when she was very young was the last time he had been in the cemetery because after his sister was buried, he grew up. He went into the military. He left virginia for a series of decades. By the time he came back, his grandmother had sold the land and the home he grew up in. And he was told, incorrectly, by some of the white neighbors that now that the family did not own the property it would be illegal for him he would be trespassing if he went back to the cemetery. To make matters worse, in the 1970s as he got older, he approached a lawyer about trying to get access to the site, and she told him, also incorrectly that if he would pay her she , would try to work the system for him. So, his visit with me was the first time that he had come back to the site. This tells us so many things about these cemeteries, but the first, thecus on virginia statute provides access to any descendent to their cemeteries. Trump, Donald Trumps son, who runs a vineyard on land that is former plantation land could not deny someone access to a Family Cemetery if there was one on his land. Second, these oral traditions are so very important, both that he could help me identify who this girl was because as many of you realized, since she died in the 20s, she was not on the census anywhere. She was born after the 1920 census and she died before 1930. This is just some of the insight that we get from these cemeteries, and another reason why it is very important to proactively locate them and produce maps, so that other people know where these burials are located. So sometimes it is very hard to locate these cemeteries. Other times, they are really hidden in plain sight. Some of you might recognize in the lower righthand corner i have not indicated what it is, i indicated the other stuff. The other green thing is Scott Stadium the university of , virginia football stadium. For those of you who have not been to Scott Stadium, it must hold 120,000 people, located a stones throw away from the lawn, the rotunda, the center of campus. And in turn, a stones throw away from that football stadium, ryrst if we look at the mau plantation, that arrow is pointing to a house that is Still Standing in the upper lefthand corner. That is located in what is today faculty housing. At university of virginia, right off fontaine avenue. If you are going to the football game, you will probably drive by it. That, in turn, was a 19thcentury plantation of by the maury family. What this map does not show any longer is the maury family has their own cemetery a couple of hundred yards away from that Plantation House. When they why didnt the road, fontaine avenue, the family decided that they would relocate their cemetery a little bit of a ways away. So their cemetery is gone but if , it was still there, it would fit the pattern i described before. A White Cemetery with another Slave Cemetery a quarter to half a mile away. Virginia is in every nook and cranny of this neighborhood today. The slave cemeteries, outlined in the center of those buildings, those are dorms. The reason they are in that kind of funny shape, bracketing the empty what looks like a driveway, is because the driveway is the location of dozens and dozens of slave burials. These were the individuals who worked at the maury plantation. The extra twist to the story is that when i went to look for the was one ofin, it those he said, she said, lynn, you found the uva Slave Cemetery, right . At that time, i myself lived no more than three quarters of a mile from here. I trumped over with my dog, and it took me an hour and a half. That was because first of all, someone told me it was in the wrong place. When i got there i was asking , students, staff, people who worked in the cafeteria and no one had any idea what i was talking about, even though they walked through it and around it constantly. There are no surviving stones, which does make it difficult. They knew it was a burial site when they went to build the dorms and they brought in archaeologists to survey the burials. But at the time, they decided they knew were the burials were but did not remark them with any stones. People can be forgiven for not recognizing it, but uva did try to mark it with a soft brush with a sign. But the only problem is that this marker on the lefthand side is the one that is the plaque in the center of the stone wall. And that stone wall, it might be hard to see from my photograph but it is a resting spot on a very steep staircase that goes up a hill. What everyone would do is they get up halfway on the stairs and they would sit on a bench. Of course, if you sit on the bench theres no way you will , read the plaque, its below your waist level. I will come back later to this later about marking these sites with sign so you do not have to go on a treasure hunt. If you cannot read it on the lower lefthand corner, the inscription is this area contains unmarked graves believed to be the slaves of the maury family. Another quick example before i move on in plain sight. I do not know if anyone recognizes this site. This is the Slave Cemetery at monticello. If any of you know who have visited monticello, World Heritage site, the Slave Cemetery they have located so far, which i am sure is just one of many, is located in the middle of the parking lot. This was an unfortunate it was relocated decades ago after they had made the parking lot. If you are visiting monticello leave,sure before you get out of your car, and they have a very nice walkway that takes you to the cemetery. So, you found the cemetery and to find a cemetery, you have to know what these gravestones might look like. There is a tremendous amount of variability in these historic africanamerican gravestones. This is one of the reasons it is interesting. It is not just a testament to wards attitudes towards death or religious beliefs, its also a testament to the art history of these communities the last 200 years. This is a stone it is carved, i know its hard to see in my betsy,aph it says the stone of an enslaved woman on a plantation. Although i dont have time today to go through all the stone variability but i am happy to answer questions afterwards from left to right, i want to highlight that on the lefthand side, these little metal markers , they were the bane of my existence when i started this project because i did not know what they were. Visitedthe cemeteries i initially had dozens and dozens of these stones. Locally available field stones. I would get to these metal markers and suddenly i thought i could read something, i thought there were numbers on it. The first couple dozen of these i found, i wrote down all those numbers. I will tell you, if you do this, dont bother, thats the patent number. [laughter] ms. Rainville these markers, invented around the early 20th cent