 David, what's going on here today at the cemetery? We're holding a stone restoration workshop, the first one that has ever been held in the cemetery to my knowledge. And the friends have been wanting to do this for a long time and we took as our example the workshop that Tamara did last year in Eastern Cemetery which several of us attended so we wanted to invite her back. So Tamara, being a gravestone restoration specialist is not a career that everybody goes into. How did you do it first? I kind of came by this in a side route. I actually when I was five I lost a brother so I grew up in cemeteries. I learned to read there and hung out there a lot with my mother. And then we just took care of family plots and that but I went off to college to do fine art but I love history, I love stone, I want to be outside and I just kind of got attracted to this kind of thing, went to a workshop and that was it. That was 15 years ago. There's a lot of do's and don'ts in terms of gravestone restoration so what are the top do's and don'ts that people who are interested in restoring perhaps their own family gravestones, what should they think about, what should they not do? Well I say that 90% of my work is fixing good intentions. People mean well but they don't educate themselves on products sometimes so I find a lot of liquid nails or bondo or something trying to put things back together. If it's in pieces you're going to need a professional but if you just need to clean the stone, water, water, water, don't use bleach, don't use any of these products like that. I do use a biocide called D2 which you can get at paint stores and stuff. That's what wallpaper and painters use to kill the mold and that's good if it's covered with mold and lichens but sometimes it's just caring and setting them up straight that's mainly what we're going to show today is just a little bit of prevention can really help save the stone. But what are they made of? What are they? How do we treat them? How do we know what to do with them? Marble is very common in the cemetery around here. Marble starts as limestone well it actually starts at little sea creatures like a billion years ago and it fell to the bottom of the sea and got compressed. It's a sediment rock it's just kind of stuck together a little bit. Limestone when it's pushed underground and gets pressure and heat added to it crystallizes, metamorphosizes and becomes marble. Most of your modern stones are granite it's a let me get this right igneous stone and it's formed in the magma chamber depending on what materials were there and how quickly or slowly it cooled over millions of years. Size of the crystal you get it's very hard stone but don't be deceived hard is brittle too. So if a tree branch hits it it's liable to plunk off that corner fractures in a very different way. But cleaning it I mean you can it doesn't sugar as we talk about the marble little grains will separate we call that sugaring so. And today's class what are you going to be showing? We're going to start with the basics and just how to document a stone and and you know tell what's wrong with this stone. We're also going to do some simple cleaning and resets of small monuments then later in the day we're going to show how to pick up a larger stone I have a tripod and mortaring back together and those types of techniques. Plastic plastic plastic plastic good metal bad that's all you need to know. Plastic plastic plastic. A lot of the damage on here will be from uh sorry mowers getting too close little knicks metal is just it's worse enemy especially on this very soft stone. So I also have plastic garden trowels that I use not like a bucket the dollar store you know. I might scrape off some of the lichens with uh with the plastic trowel first if especially if it's very thick get into some of the places um you're fortunate here because there's water sometimes there is a water in the cemetery you got to bring it in yourself. I like to use the jugs of water some people like these um uh like like sprayers that use for pesticide or something you know pump sprayers and it just just doesn't give me enough water you know it's water water water water the wetter the easier you'll see. So I'll just give it a little scrape take off the big clumpy stuff now one of the main things to remember is when you do start to wet it down and wash it is to start at the bottom and work your way up otherwise you'll get streaks running down and then you really can't get rid of them. And then water and more water once again from the bottom up because we don't want streaks running around. And some people you know AGS in a few places you know suggest soap and photo flow and so just with some little soft brushing my water is going to turn dark soon but we can just watch this go away. It's like one of those wow sham gonna come and do it now how much now how much you wish there was more look how nice William's looking already how's he look now when you look at modern gravestones they're very shiny and um glossy and hard granite and that sort of thing are a lot of the gravestones that you restore are those were those did they look like that when they first started or were they different stone altogether um yes and i'm always amazed and i wonder what did these look like on a sunny day when you're filled with a cemetery filled with these white marble they had a high shine one of the ways that they defined marble from limestone was it took a polish and when i take some of these monuments apart in between these layers they're still a polish it's still it's hasn't been affected by the environment and they're shiny and they're bright and you think you know 50 or 100 of these standing out in a cemetery on a crisp fall morning what did that look like you know it was pretty pretty impressive i think as you go through restoring gravestones what sort of sense of history you do do get at the sense of the lives of the people of the gravestones well i do say that these these cemeteries are museums to the average guy sometimes you don't know a lot about the person except what's on that stone sometimes town records were lost or you know it was never even written down but you know we can tell a lot by the person by the size of the monument um you know they had some kind of wealth um it may state on there how they died or at least their age and maybe a verse and how they felt about things we can tell a lot about who carved it or or where it was made where it came from the industry of that time so they're pretty impressive and and stand up over records you know but the cemetery has so much work in it and the friends is such a small group that it's difficult for us to sort of do this on our own so we've enlisted the city to help us get started on this and help provide materials and um we've managed to get um i think about 21 people today to come to this workshop and and participate so we're we're delighted that we've had the turnout that we have as a friends organization our mission is to restore protect and conserve the cemetery for future generations and part of that if we really take it to that level would be looking at the stones themselves and what condition they're in and there's never been a survey done of the stone condition and a lot of them are in rough shape and need help and i think as a friends group we would advocate for doing that on a yearly basis and holding a workshop or getting together with a group and taking on a few stones and from this workshop we should learn how to do it if people interested in helping the friends with this project or other projects how can they contact you they can contact us through our website um i think it's uh www.friendsofevergreen.org you can see all that's going on with our friends organization and our walking tours on the website