Translating the Stories of the Dead to the Living

I think too often we forget about all the humans involved in historic preservation, and in the committing of oral and other history to the next generation. Which is why people like Christina Marshall, featured in a Banner-Herald article titled "Athens Cemetery History Set in Stone" should be featured more often.

Too often historic preservation is boiled down to exemplary architecture or even remnants of physical space. Tombstones can certainly take this form, since their history is written more or less upon them. On their face, tombstones are a form of funerary art and they mark the passage of a life. However, tombstones, like most other physical spaces and markers of the past, exist in a context that can be very complex. Without skilled interpreters, or at least passionate ones, this context tends to go unrecognized.

Oconee Hill, like a lot of others of its vintage, has been altered over the years to allow the dead to move for reasons as varied as marital status changes of the survivors, because of other cemeteries changing status, or because of political or social context There are reasons why one grave has an elaborate headstone and another is lost in the undergrowth, or why one is lovingly tended and another is neglected. The space itself tells some of the story, but a historian's voice communicates it more effectively to the fellow living.