 to you at this time. Susan Barger from the FAIC. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. I'm glad to see that you're here. Linda, we do do closed captioning after the webinars are recorded. And I'm going to be sending a bunch of recordings of the webinars off to the office. So if you look in the posting, when they have a closed caption, there's something that says, if you want closed caption, go here. We find that it's better to have them done retroactively than on the fly. They're more accurate. Okay, so you can keep up with us. If you're not on our listserv, please go ahead and join it. This is the email for it. And it only has maybe two or three announcements a month, and it's only for announcements. So you can't chat on it or anything like that. So it won't overload your inbox. We also have Facebook and we're on Twitter. You can contact me anytime. This is my email address, and I'm happy to listen to suggestions, complaints, testimonials, any of that stuff. We're happy that you're whatever you have to say. And if you have questions and you want someone to answer a person, a conservator, you can post those questions in the discussion form. You do have to register in the forum to do that, but it doesn't cost anything and it only takes a few minutes. And next week we're going to do something on running a Kickstarter campaign. Then we're going to take a little bit of a break for summer. At the end of July, we're going to do something on ivory. The beginning of August, we'll do something on emergency planning when you have living animals in your collection. And we're working on fall things. One of the fall things is going to be magpa issues and digital imaging and metadata. And that's about it. So we'll hope to see you next week, and I'm going to turn this over to Jason Church. Okay, so I see I'm unmuted. I believe hopefully everyone can hear me okay. And just to back up before I start with what Susan said, you know, I teach cemetery classes all over the country. And the number one question that people ask me and people email me is where do I find funding? So by all means, I'm going to take it. You should absolutely, when we get off this webinar, log in and take Claire Dean's class on crowd sourcing and funding ideas that way, because I think that's a really important thing that for us all to learn for the future, because as we know, there's not a whole lot of money for preservation. So every way we can be creative, let's do it. So thank you for everyone coming out and registering for this and watching this and taking part. And by all means, I'm excited about your questions that I'll get to at the end. My name is Jason Church. I work for the National Center for Preservation, Technology, and Training. And we are a research and training office of the National Park Service. We're located in Nakadish, Louisiana. And we do both trainings like this. We convene trainings and conferences. And we also do hands-on training. I think there's a little upcoming events handout that you can look at that has some of our upcoming trainings. But by all means, check out our website, training calendar. There's lots of training that's not just cemetery related. So we'll get started today. And then hopefully I cover everything you're wanting to know. If not, I'll be here for that. So just start off with this photograph. This is the only one I've stolen off the Internet years and years ago. I don't know where it came from. I've had this picture about 20 years now. This is an important photograph. This is a family reunion. This is when we had family reunions at cemeteries. Why do we have cemeteries? The reason is most of your family were there. You know, most of your family were married there. You had more family there than other places. So this is a big issue that we don't do this anymore. So it takes us as community members, as concerned historians, as conservators to take care of the cemeteries since we don't have these sort of events that take care of the cemeteries. The families don't take care of the cemeteries themselves any longer. So why is it? Why are we interested in cemeteries? And as a conservator, I'm very concerned with anything that I do. How is it going to last for this generation, the next, the next? So always keep that in mind when we talk about preserving cemeteries. We are really, you know, we're not looking for, well, this is going to work well right now. We need to think about long-term goals always. You know, what's this, how's this going to affect 50 years, 100 years down the line? Are the products I'm using? Are the techniques I'm doing? You know, how is this going to affect the future? So that's really important for us. So the reason that cemetery preservation has gotten to be a such, such a huge, huge thing is that, you know, genealogy. Genealogy is the fastest growing pastime in America. It is exploded. It's such a huge thing. When I started 15 years ago doing cemetery preservation, you'd run across a few. Rootsweb was new and things like that. But if you look at them, how much they've grown exponentially over the last 10 years, it's staggering. And that's really what's driving this. You know, if anyone was on find a grave 10 years ago, it was just basically politicians with famous, you know, rock stars or movie. Now there's hundreds of thousands of listings on there. And the reason is, is genealogy. So a lot of times this is who's coming to you. This is who's doing the work. This is who has become interested in cleaning and resetting is the genealogist that are coming in. They're finding cemeteries abandoned. And they want to take them over. They want to help those sites. For me personally, the reason I got interested in cemetery preservation is I'm trained as an architectural conservator and I started doing a lot of work on outdoor sculpture. And I got really interested in cemeteries because of this, the artistic value. And one thing we need to think about in our communities is this artistic value. Yes, it is an absolutely important historical site that has, you know, the, literally the founders of your community are buried there. The people that started all this are buried there. But the other thing to think about is, this is your city sculpture garden. We're not going to be able to go out and buy and collect the quality and the amount of sculpture that you have located there. And I know some communities have really cashed in on this and have convinced their city that, hey, you know, we have this amazing sculpture garden right here in our own community that we need to take appreciation for. And that's exactly what it is. For me as a conservator, I see this as, you know, just a huge sculpture garden that we can walk with its beautiful park-like setting. So really important thing that I think we sort of overlook. And not only do we think about the large sculpted, you know, imported Italian sculptures and that sort of thing, but what we need to also think is, what about all the vernacular markers? And personally, these are my favorite. And I can't stress enough how important they are, but the homemade markers. So we have two examples here. I'll see if I can try my little, there we go. So we have an example here. This is actually a concrete marker. So someone made this mold, they made these letters and they cast it. So this is a homemade marker, even though it's done very, very professionally. And you can still see the line marks lining up the line type just like you would an old printing press. But also, you know, the homemade ones, this is made with upholstery nails and little tags like you put on your mailbox. And unfortunately for conservators, this is a big issue. These things weren't made to last, but, you know, it's a big issue. We really need to consider these vernacular markers as important as our highly sculpted ones. So another reason that we preserve historic cemeteries are these are direct, tangible links to historic events and historic people. I do a lot of work with heritage education, bringing school groups in and kids. And the reality is that this to them shows them, you know, it's not this abstract, well, there was a war during this time period and these people did things or this thing happened. You can go out in the cemetery and you can say, okay, kids, here is a person who fought in, for example, the Indian Wars. Here was their name. Here was their rank. Here was their unit. We can look that up. We can study this person. And it's amazing how many military historians have added just tons of records online. You can actually go in now and Google unit numbers and find out their whole history and things like that, which really baffles kids and adults as well. For example, I just did a class at Huntsville, Alabama. I don't know anything about the Huntsville Meridian. This surveyor line that's for them a very historically important thing. And here is the surveyor. Here is the Meridian line right there in the cemetery marked out. Here's the grave of the surveyor. So all these things, you know, you're going to learn every time you go out in there. And, you know, it's not an abstract thing anymore. We have concrete evidence of that history. So another good example here, again, was doing a recent class and this grave. I don't know this. I'd never heard of Mr. Erskine. Look it up. Google it. Everyone's talking about it. He was one of the original designers for Studebaker. His whole history is there. And we have that direct link for the community, for the people right there. And people really can get behind that. It's an important thing for our community. So we all love cemeteries. That's why we're here. That's why it's so popular and so many people are interested. And one of the first things that we do, one of the most important things that we can do is documentation. And there's lots of reasons for this. And one of the biggest reasons is a lot of times when you're looking for grants or you're looking to put it on a national register or your state historic register, they want to know that you've already done documentation. That's one of the first things that people get asked. They step back and say, well, have you already done the good faith effort of doing documentation? And a lot of times the answer is no. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, like how to do it, why we should do it. So in documentation, one of the first things that we think about is going out and photographic upgrades. And we'll get to that. But there's lots of other things that we can do before we even get there. And one of the things is finding primary resources, original historic documentation of our site. The Victorians, if you don't know, cemeteries became very celebrated during the Victorian era. One of the reasons for that is the death rate was so high, it was everywhere. You were going to the cemetery constantly. So they became, that's when we started getting these park-like settings. There were tourism guides to cemeteries, stereoscope views, postcards, just an immense amount of resources that came out during that time period. And you can go find those on eBay. You can find them at your historical society. But great, great examples of places that are still around that we can look at. A good example here is a postcard from Colonial Park Cemetery. And if any of you have been there, you should. It's right downtown in Savannah. It's a great cemetery. But if we go out there and we walk it now, we look at early photographs and early postcards, there's a definite disconnect. And we realize, well, it doesn't look like that. Why doesn't it look like that anymore? And we do know through research that in the 1920s, they decided to beautify the site. And in doing that, they put in these very picturesque walkways and landscaping. And they rearranged all the markers and headstones and even the mausoleums to sort of fit in this new landscape. So that's the important part of its history now that we have to sort of understand. And one of the easiest ways is to go back and look at historic photographs that were available. Another great example is the photograph above. This was taken at a family reunion. So people may have photographs of the cemetery they don't know they have. It did work one time at a little church in South Carolina. And we had three children's tombs that were completely just a pile of rubble. And we were trying to figure out what did they look like. We didn't know. As conservators, I couldn't fake and rebuild it the way we thought it should look. We really needed to know what they looked like. And so we started asking, is anyone got photographs? And no one had older photographs. And finally, we were thinking, well, wait a minute. Who here has wedding photographs? And everyone scratched their head and thought that was a really odd thing. But once they started looking at their mothers and their grandmothers' wedding photographs, these little tombs were right outside the front doors. We found pictures all the way back into the 30s of these little tombs. And we knew exactly what they used to look like through wedding photographs. So if you're doing work at a site, this is a new site. You're taking it on. You're doing a preservation project. We're on an ad in the paper. Does anyone have photographs from family reunions? Does anyone have photographs, that sort of thing? I taught a class in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a few years ago. And while we were out cleaning graves, a gentleman walked up and thanked us and told us that he had grown up at a house right across the street that he wanted to show us something. So we were working. There were maybe in the 20-foot by 20-foot area we were in. There were maybe two graves we were cleaning. And he brings us a photograph of him in the 1940s on his little scooter right in front of the cemetery taken from his driveway. In that photograph, in the same area we were in, like I said, it was about 20-foot square, were probably 50-head grave markers. We don't know where they'd gone. We don't know when they left or where they went. But we know the site right now looks nothing like it did in the 1940s, which was a big shocker. No one knew that. And the people working at the cemetery were very shocked by this. So getting that kind of information is really important. We don't really think about that. Another type of documentation, sort of what I just mentioned with the gentleman in late Geneva, oral interviews. That seems like an odd thing. But we've gotten lots of great information. My photographs here are of a lady, Miss Bertha Lee. She's in her 90s, still a fantastic memory. She's been caring and helping with this cemetery for, you know, 70-some years. We brought her out. We walked around with her. We recorded interviews with her. She was able to tell us who all the unmarked graves were. She knew who they were, how they were related, who, you know, about when they died, but their full names and how they were related. So, you know, a big thing that we didn't realize anyone knew this. Her children were with us. They were in their 50s. They had never seen this. They didn't know any of this information. So, oral interviews. An odd thing, but a really good type of documentation. So, another reason the documentation is important, your account of your current condition. You know, this is another good thing for granting agencies and for trying to get on historic registers and things like that. They want to see what do you have? You know, what is this cemetery comprised of? What kind of things are out there? Who's out there? Why are they important? You know, what are important about the things that you see, that you're seeing out there? A record of existing materials. Unfortunately, I'm not going to talk a lot about this, but I'm sure we all know theft is a huge issue in some materials, especially metalwork. It's so easy to turn it back over. Bronze is a huge issue. People are stealing plaques and urns and flower vases, and they can't get their hands on. The same with historic fencing. It's so easily sellable that it's become a huge issue. So, one of the things that I've run across over and over and over across the U.S. is something's stolen, but you don't actually have proof of what it looked like. The local law enforcement may not return it to you once they find something like that. So, for example, if you go and say, someone's stolen six gates, they say, okay, well, show us what they look like. You know, I don't know what they look like. They looked, they were about this big. Well, we have some, but how can you prove they're yours? So, that's the important thing. Record of existing materials. And it's something, if you're starting to have theft problems, you might want to stop what you're doing, not worry so much about the grade, and go out and photograph the furniture that's out there, the fencing that's out there, iron work that's out there, gates, any bronze, that sort of thing to sort of have that in case this comes up. And hopefully it won't, but you never know. So, in documentation also really helps us to establish preservation priorities. One of the things that I find when you do documentation is you really start seeing what you have. Oh, gosh, I, you know, till we went out and started photographing, I didn't realize, you know, we had water issues over here or that we needed this many graves reset, that, you know, we need so much tree work done over here. And that's a really good thing to be able to say to people when they come, and they will come. If you see a really active group working in a cemetery, it brings more people to the group. You know, it's a great example. Last time I checked, like 70% of all Boy Scout, Eagle Scout projects, I had something to do with the cemetery. So people are always looking for that. So then you can say, hey, yes, actually, we do have a problem. We need some trees planted over here or we need to raise money for this. And, you know, a good example are these two mausoleums, which is the preservation priority, the one that's already fallen but contains historically significant person or the one that's more modern but is actively coming apart. You know, obviously we need to stabilize that one first. And it's your job to convince people of that because sometimes people are going to choose the historic one over the active one. So survey forms, there's lots of forms available. There's no reason to make your own unless there's something really specific that you want to capture but there's tons of them out there. The important thing, and I've got some links to more forms and ways, places you can download them and get them. The most important thing is to decide the meaning of all of your terms and train all the people that are going to be involved before you even start. This happens a lot. I worked at a cemetery that brought in AmeriCorps. This is nothing bad about AmeriCorps. It's a fantastic organization. This is about the cemetery. They brought in an AmeriCorps group, gave them no training, handed them clipboards, handed them surveys, and said, hey, everyone go out. We need to document this whole site. It was a 70-acre site. It was an entire summer project, almost three months worth of work. They turned it over to us and we realized it was garbage. It was useless because no one told them what a headstone was versus a footstone. It might seem very simplistic to us, but if you've never been in a cemetery, we had twice as many headstones all of a sudden because people didn't realize that. So train all the people involved. This is all being recorded, so you can go look at it later, but here's some places you can get it. So when I say train people, buy some donuts, get everyone together in the cemetery in the morning, maybe give a little PowerPoint, maybe just do a walk-around tour and say, hey, this is a footstone. This is a headstone. That sort of thing. More survey forms available. These are really good ones, but like I said, this is being recorded. Descriptions, maybe check on a few people. Is everybody getting it right? Are you putting the right thing down? And this is a time to involve the community. Girl Scout projects, Boy Scouts, DAR, UDC. I've done tons of work with veterans groups. I've done tons of works of work with National Guard. Some cities will bring out prisoners to do work service. This is an easy way to involve the community. Now I know, for example, we're located on a college campus. All the fraternities and sororities have to do X amount of work to service work a year to keep their chargers up. What do we do? We go to them and say, hey, we'd like for you to come out in the cemetery and do a cleanup day. They love it. They get their hours. They get to log it in. Lots and lots of ways to involve the community. And this is a low tech job. We can train anyone. We can train little kids how to do good survey work. And we're talking about that. How would different people describe this? It doesn't matter. You pick what you're going to call it and you stick with that. Maybe make a little survey sheet that has little blind drawings or photographs on it to aid these people. Give them, and this is just an example. I'm going to go through this really fast, a little PowerPoint that says, hey, headstones. This is what a headstone is. This is what this kind of headstone is. It has no base. It's supported by the ground. It's just sitting down in the soil. We call that a ground supported headstone. This is important for us later because it's a lot of user to reset. One of these versus ones with multiple stack bases, things like that. So we're looking at preservation efforts later. We look through the survey. We can say, oh, okay, we've got this many ground supported headstones. They're leaning. This is something we should do with another group. Stack bases. So I get distracted. I keep looking over the comments. Someone said, what a great high school senior project. Absolutely. I have worked with tons of schools over the years. I've actually done webinars specifically for schools where they send me photographs of their site and I walk them through the best ways to clean and the best ways to document their site. This is one thing that gets overlooked, but I can't stress it enough. We don't think about documenting funeral home plaques. For some reason, if everyone doesn't know, a funeral home plaque is a temporary marker that is supposed to be put in. The monument builder comes. He sets the headstone there. He pulls the funeral home plaque out. That's how they're supposed to work. It's not really how it always works. If you look at the dates, it may be hard to see. One of them stayed in 1967. I took this photograph a couple of years ago. That's not a temporary marker anymore. 1967, that is the only marker we have for Herman. So these become important things to document, to photograph, to write them down, because all it's going to take is a weed eater or a mower to hit this. And wham, Herman's gone. We don't know where he's buried anymore. We don't even know who he is. Very important thing to document. For example, the one over here. This is the style. This is ceramic. You wrote on it with a China pin, a China marker. Obviously it's been out there so long that it's gone. Very important things to document. Also documenting materials, because as a conservator, and you're looking at preservation plans, what you can work on with marble versus wood is a big difference. So for example, these look very similar, but we have marble, limestone, concrete, zinc. They all react very differently. And what I would recommend cleaning marble with, I would not want to use on zinc. Quite frankly, I don't want to use anything on zinc but water and a soft bristle brush. So it's important to get someone who knows these materials, explain to everyone, talk them through. So when you're doing documentation, transcription is obviously a very important thing. So if we look at this headstone here, this is a beautiful, vernacular, handmade concrete marker. I love it. What's written here all becomes important. And this is the proper way right here. If it's capitalized, you write it capitalized. If it's abbreviated, you write it abbreviated. You leave it exactly like you see it. And sort of this backslash denotes line breaks. So this would be the right way to transcribe it. And of course, with the line breaks, we would know if you had it all written out. What's important is a lot of genealogical websites will show just what's at the bottom, because that's the only thing they're interested in. So I run across this a lot where genealogists come out, they do transcriptions, they do documentation, but they only list the birth and death dates. It only tells us part of the history and the story of the stone. So it's really important to document the whole thing. For example, this is one of my favorite graves. I love these vernacular markers. So right here we have, if this is how it's written, we should leave it how it's written. If it's backwards, we can denote it with a couple different ways by either saying, you know, indicates a backward letter or backwards with little quotes kind of thing. Because, you know, it being backwards is part of the history of that stone. One of the other important things, we talked about sort of documenting everything it says, but graves are filled with really important iconography and symbolism that tells us not only the values of that person, what groups they belong to, maybe what their trade was. So these are all important. So look at that. This is a great book to look at, carry around with you. I've yet to stump it. I don't know that I found anything that wasn't in there if I looked hard enough. Another thing is we've talked all about the headstones. And let's be honest, that's what most people are interested in, that they're only really concerned with the headstones. But we need to keep in mind that all the elements in a cemetery make them a historic site. So this all becomes part of the fabric of the historic landscape. So adding the cribbing and the curving. So this is called, I guess I should say that. This is cribbing that goes around. And this used to be very, very common. And sometimes you'll look, you'll see bases that'll have two little keyways cut here, and people will wonder what was there. It had cribbing and it's been removed. The other is what's called coping. So this denotes usually a family lot or a paternity group or some sort of grouping that was put together. So very important, all of these things come up. This makes the overall historic landscape of the cemetery and all these things become important. We've lost a lot of these things, especially curbing and cribbing and fencing as well. And people will tell you, oh well, fencing went away in the 1940s for World War II scrap drives. That's romanticized. Yes, probably some of it did, but the reality is most of it we got rid of in the 60s and 70s when the cemetery wanted to buy a riding mower. And we're still doing that. That's where a lot of the cribbing went. A lot of times in maintenance yards you could find big stacks of marble that were cribbing that they took out. I recently did a class, I won't say where, but in walking around afterwards, just for a day out there, we've done cleaning, walking around afterwards, I had a gentleman from the city say, hey, do you think this cribbing, I mean this coping is really important? I said absolutely. He goes, do you would keep it? Oh, absolutely. This is very important. And we were looking at one that was actually carved marble and he said, huh, we just brought it up at city council last month that we should pull all this out because it would save us money. And it baffled me. And I said, well, please don't. And he said, well, since you say you're an expert, I guess we'll leave it. We don't realize this is still being done and people are still not considering that. So here we go. More things that become part of this historic, that become historic, these are all part of the fabric. So urns, furniture, these are things that are also easily stolen that I mentioned earlier. But document these, photograph them, put them on a map. So creating, locating a site map. And the reason I say we're locating, it's amazing how many sites I've worked at that already have a map. Go do a little bit of research, find out, go to the diocese, go to the city planner, go to the historical society, really look around and ask people because a lot of times it's already there. You may need to modify it, you may need to work on it, but we have very short institutional memories. We forget that these things already exist. And now we can do GPS embedded photography. It's all become very simplistic to what it was a few years ago. So a map can be very simple or it can be much more complex. This is one that was done, this is NGIS. This is done with a robotic total station. This is submeter accuracy. Each of those are in the database you click on and it comes up, you know, the history of that grave. It comes up with the transcription. It comes up with the condition assessment report. You can make them very complicated if you want. Or you can make them very simplistic. One of the greatest maps I've ever seen was a cemetery. It was about two acres. It had a chain-link fence that went around it. And they had taken surveyors tape and they'd made a huge grid in 10-foot squares. And on the fence they had taken solo cups, stuck them into the fence and written big letters on one side of the fence and numbers on the other. When volunteers came in they gave you a clipboard and they said, you are A3 and you only had to document and map a 10-foot square. Great way to do it. No technology involved. Came out with a beautiful map. Photodocumentation. So with photodocumentation, a picture is worth a thousand words. Take pictures. We all have digital cameras now. Take lots of pictures. Close-up of epitaph. Close-up of iconography. Front, back. And the most important thing that I could tell you, take anything else away from this. Once you're done, share those photographs. Digital is not archival. Print those out. Give them to the local historic society. Give them to something. Share those photographs. So when you're doing photodocumentation, use, you know, don't use shaving cream. This comes up all the time. This is a good example of what is happening over here. You have this morgues board of biological growth due to shaving cream being put on an epitaph by someone. And then we have to do a lot more to get that off. There's lots of other reasons. Flower does the exact same thing. Chalk. Chalk can be damaging and staining as well. So when photodocumentation, it's really easy to do just good lighting. And that can be done with reflectors. These are easily found. They could be official photo reflectors. Or they could be something as simple as what you put in your car window. That's what I use. And these can even be done by yourself with a tripod. Or, you know, bring a friend out. 20-degree angle. That sort of thing. You can get good photographs that way. And here's a good example. Hold nose. You could come across a really difficult one that you just can't seem to document. Then, you know, shining a light directly across would really shows up those lettering. It puts shadow in there. Then you can photograph that. That one works really well. Another thing with photodocumentation that's really important. I love color. I talked about my love of vernacular markers. This is an important part of the cemetery. This is... Oh, so here I'm going to back up and answer questions since everyone else is answering. So the question came up by Lee out of Hayes, Kansas. So why are we using shaving cream? So if you look in this photograph, that was hard to read epitaph. Someone has sprayed shaving cream all over the surface of this. It has to be done dry, which is one of our biggest issues. Then they squeegee that off with a squeegee and it leaves shaving cream in the indentions so they can photograph and transcribe it. You can't do it wet. So you're actually putting dry shaving cream on, which is very absorbent into the stone. Stones are really absorbent. So then that leaves all that stuff behind oils, lotions, allows, that then comes up and encourages biological growth. So the next thing... We're talking about color. For example, this one, Miss Bradley here, if we have in our documentation that this is a painted epitaph, then if no one comes back in a year or two and this wears off, we'll see in our documentation, oh, this used to be painted. This must be the one. I get questions all the time, why do they have these really elaborate markers and no epitaph? They had an epitaph. It was probably painted on. Another thing, a lot of times with especially concrete markers, just because they look like concrete now doesn't mean they always did. So they were probably faux-finished at one point. So it's important to try to document the last of the remnants of that. Maybe they were lime-washed. Maybe they were painted. Maybe it were faux-finished to look like marble and granite. Just because you bought a concrete marker didn't mean you wanted a concrete marker. So a lot of times those were faux-finished. Another thing, this one had a porcelain photograph at one point. It's been stolen. Document that. One of the important things, if you're starting on a site that looks like this, that's a good thing because you sort of have a clean slate to start with. Because one of the things that we see a lot, especially in African-American cemeteries and pioneer cemeteries, we see plants used as grave markers. Here's a good example. So I didn't even know this was a grave. It had these sort of sprigly brown stick-looking things. We came back in the springtime. This is actually a T-rose, and they were in perfect little rows all over the site. So this one I used for an example because it has a temporary funeral home marker. Of course, there's nothing written on it, but we know, hey, look, here's the head of a grave. Lots of them didn't. So look for plants as grave markers. Here's a couple more examples. Also, unconventional grave markers. Again, doing an oral history, we discovered this is actually the axle to a tractor, and the children actually put that there as their dad's grave. Out of respect, that is his actual marker. They know it. They know he's there. They know that's an axle off of a Ford red-belly tractor. Traditionally, for example, if you live like where I live in Louisiana, we don't have stones in the ground. So if you see a stone in the cemetery, there's somebody under that. African tradition of using conch shells. There's several mythos behind that. So document those because they easily walk away. And this is called grave-mounting. It's a very southern thing. I don't know that I've ever seen it. I've seen it in North Carolina. I've never seen it. But grave-mounting is where you literally mound dirt up and then you sweep the area clean. So all of this is swept clean once a year at a reunion day. It only takes a year. If no one comes out, that's gone. Also document metal markers, like this GAR star that is a flag holder, that sort of thing. And sometimes you might want to, like if you're doing a cemetery, you might want to do its own survey form. This is an example of a fencing survey form where we photograph the gate. We've done some photographs. We've done a description. And then we've done a little map here of all the elements that are still existing. So if that's an important thing for your site, you might want to consider that. So the other thing is establishing preservation priorities. So is a stone that's already on the ground more important or one that's on its way down? One that is leaning and is in danger of falling is definitely a higher priority than one that's already lying down. Because when these go, when these go, they're probably going to do some damage. They're probably going to break. So that has to become a higher priority for you. And that'll all be written when you're doing documentation. So another thing is if it's already broken, it's probably not going to break any further. If it's standing upright and not lying down, that's good. The mower's not going to hit it. You do have to be somewhat concerned with theft of the elements. But if that's not a big issue in your area, then these become lower priorities. The ones that are leaning are worse. And the ones that are actually in contact with the ground where the mower's getting them, they become a bigger priority. So the ones that are broken but sort of at rest like these become a lower priority for preservation. And then also sometimes looking at much bigger pictures than the stones. So for example, in this cemetery, we're working at huge drainage issues that are literally washing the stones away and undermining all of the foundations of these stones. This has to be something that needs to be addressed immediately. And in this upper photograph, there used to be a set of coping right here. That's actually lying down here. The water's already washed that away. Here again, as a conservator, if we're looking at something like this, we could try to catch what last epithaphs on there, but most likely it's already gone. These become super low priorities because we've already lost them as a historic record. And one of the things I want to mention, because it comes up so often, when we have stones like this that are broken up, I hear a lot of people say, well, we can't really fix these. There wasn't anything we could do about them. Yes, we can. This is when you need to hire a professional but absolutely these can be fixed. So this is where you need to go in and bring in a professional, maybe send a photograph, talk to them, get quotes, figure out a priority for these, but know that these can be fixed and not sunk into concrete. This comes up a lot. It comes up all the time. I was actually just at a site where they had gone ahead and they had sunk pieces just like I saw in the last photographs. They had sunk all that in the concrete. They said, well, there was no way to put it back. And I looked in and I said, yeah, we could have absolutely put that back together. They said, no, you couldn't. No, you couldn't. So what did you consult a conservator? No, but we just knew putting them in concrete was the only solution. The reality is it's not a very good solution. We can't ever separate them back out. It increases the rapid deterioration of these stones because concrete and marble, for example, in these photographs, they can expand and contract at different rates. Mowers drive over them. I mean, there's lots of things. So consult a professional. And I didn't mention this. Well, I'll mention it later about consulting a professional. And the last thing I'll talk about is just, well, who are they? And I don't get into this much. I don't really do this much myself. But a lot of times this is important for you as community members, for you as historians and genealogists, is coming up and figuring out who the people there are. And there's lots of really good little webinars and things like that about researching this sort of thing. One of the things that comes up a lot, so I thought I'd throw this in, is people wanting to put plaques on grave markers. And they can be something as simplistic as, this is a bronze plaque that was put on this stone. Probably the effort might have been put in a little bit more and repaired the stone as opposed to sticking a plaque on it. This plaque was actually drilled in and bolted through it. That didn't do any good to the stone. That did damage to the stone. The support stones had a rough enough time. It's a judgment call every time. But a lot of times plaques don't work real well. If so, why couldn't we put a simple little plaque right here that said the same thing and didn't involve drilling through and bolting it to the stone? And here's a sort of a more bigger example. This is the grave marker. This whole thing behind it is all basically signage for this person. So maybe a little extreme. Things that have a tendency to start changing the historic look and fabric of a site. So think really hard when people are asking about adding signage. All right. On to our last topic. I know I'm going really fast. This is something I usually do in four hours. So bear with me. I see tons of questions that I'm excited to get to. So cemetery care. What do we do? The quickest, easiest thing that people like to do, gets people involved, is doing cleaning. So one of the first things we have to ask ourselves, and this may seem odd, why are we cleaning it? What we're cleaning off and why we're cleaning that is going to decide how we clean it and when we clean it and how often, that sort of thing. So ask yourself, before you go to a cleaning site, well, why am I cleaning this? The number one reason people clean is readability. People want to clean so that they can read and do the genealogical information. That's fine. If you're going to do that, by all means, please clean the entire stone. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of stones over the years that they've just cleaned a little square around the epitaph. Please, if you're going to do it, clean the whole site, the whole stone. Maybe all you have is dirt. Maybe dirt has splashed up. Maybe something has rubbed up against it. And if so, maybe water and a soft bristle brush is all you need. Maybe a really gentle detergent like Orvis, that's O-R-V-U-S, is all that you need. Just a simple non-ionic surfactant to wash the dirt off of the stone is all you need. We always want to go with the gentlest means necessary. There's no reason to start introducing harder things if we don't need them. I'm going to get back with this one, biological growth. That is our number one thing. And here in the south, biological growth is everywhere. We see it all over the place. So we'll get back to that. If you have biological growth, that's the number one thing. Then you want to look at a cleaner that has a biocide in it. That is an additive specifically designed to kill biological growth. Oh, I see a discussion going on in the comments about Orvis. Orvis is actually a horse soap. It is designed to wash horses. So yes, you can find it at quilting shops. Lots of conservators use it to clean quilts and things like that. You can get it from conservation supplies. But Susan just threw that in. It is much cheaper to buy them at tractor supply or ranch or farm supply. Go find your local ag co-op. They probably have it. You only use about a cap full of five gallons of water, and it comes in a big tub. So you can share that around. It does a great job for moving dirt and soiling. It doesn't do a lot for biological growth. If you have a real heavy bio growth, you're going to need something else. And we'll get back to that. So for metallic staining, this is aesthetic. This is not an emergency. Now, if it's just strictly, gosh, this one here, he was our town founder, who was a ship captain. It's stolen now, but used to have a bronze anchor right here. And it's staying on. That's not something you're going to get off with off-the-shelf products. It's not going to happen. You're going to need to call a professional if that is a priority. If it's a priority for you to take these off, call a professional. They're going to have to use poulticing and different methods and different treatments that really should be done, you know, that should be done by a professional. And we have this red staining is from iron pins that used to be in the stone that have leached out. So sugaring is when a stone is, so marble is calcium carbonate. So you have calcium, calcite crystals that have a matrix around them that hold them in place. Sugaring is deterioration where that matrix is starting to come apart and the actual grains are starting to come out. And when you touch it, it's powdery like sugar. And, you know, that's the name that could have been done by environmental. But a lot of times when people, they show me this and they look at this, we find out it's actually from bad maintenance practices in the past. And I'll bring, I'll mention that again in just another slide. So what if you have gypsum crust? And that is, if you notice on this sculpture, so this is a close-up with a magnification, under magnification of what we're seeing right here. So if you notice, the statue looks very clean on the top, but anywhere there's recesses is very dirty and black. And unfortunately, she has lost most of her facial features. This is due to acid rain and dry deposition of acid. So the stuff in the air is actually more damaging than acid rain itself. So that's fly ash and soot and all these things that are getting blown on the sculpture and they're sticking to it. And then they slowly, their pH is high. They're slowly eating away at this stone. And as it rains, it rinses off the exposed areas, but it doesn't get to the underlying areas which continue to eat away at it. So what is behind that? It's actually chemically converting our calcium carbon, our calcite to gypsum, which is the same thing in like a wallboard, sheetrock in your house. So with this, this needs to be like serious kit gloves, very fragile. We've had really good luck cleaning these with just water misting and no chemicals or no hands-on treatments, just water misting. If you have really important sculptures like this, you might want to consult a professional to come in and look at them and talk about ways to clean that. Because if we come in and really scrub that, what is behind it is very soft powdery surface and you're going to get a really, really fast deterioration of the stone. All right, vandalism, one of my soapbox issues. With vandalism, this is something you need to call in a professional immediately. Now, if it's simple tagging like Mr. Big Show here, who's just, they're tagging their territory, that's one thing. That's just straight out vandalism. A lot of times it's politically or racially motivated. We've had a lot of that in the recent, in the last couple years, more than I've ever seen in my time. In my opinion, this should be not, you know, I'm not a big fan, let's call the newspaper, let's tell everybody about it. Because if it's done for political or racial motivation, their message just got out on a wide scale. So if I have the same agenda, if I'm very concerned, if I want people to know how I feel and I want my political view shown, I could be sitting at home watching the news and think, what a great example. If I go out and vandalize the cemetery, I'll get on the news and everyone else will know my story as well. So in my opinion, wrap in a tarp, put up plywood, bury around it, say it's, you know, you're doing conservation work, call someone in to get this off to have this removed without making it a big deal and really broadcasting it. Because more vandalism, you know, we know that vandalism begets more vandalism. So if you have graffiti tagging, have it removed immediately. And that's a really hard one. A lot of products I can recommend and things like that. But I'm really hesitant to ever recommend graffiti removal products because it is so variable. What kind of stone, what kind of paint, how hot it was, how wet it was, how long it's been sitting on there, all these things really affect how to take it off. So again, probably one I would wrap up, take a photograph, call for a professional. So what are some of the considerations regarding cleaning? Are you? So Linda Ellis just asked, do I feel the same way about thefts as that do vandalism not publicize it? No, theft should be publicized. You should call the police and call the newspaper and tell everyone to look out and make this a heart string thing. You know, we had this inch that was important to the family where the widow came and she sat and she mourned over her husband's grave and now it's gone. Where did it go? Who has seen it? Please let us know. Get to be, if you have a theft issue in your community, get to know all the garden shops, get to know all the antique stores, all the salvage stores, go to the salvage scrap yards, talk to them, get to know them and say, look, this is what I'm looking for. This is a picture of what was stolen. Hey, if you ever see something you're questioning, call me. Get to know them before you need to sometimes. If you know you've got a problem. Of course, if you've never had a problem in your area which could totally be true, then you know, probably not for that. So are you accelerating deterioration? Is there a loss of original materials? And what is the long-term stability of your cleaners and what you're doing? We're going to talk about that. So we're okay with low pressure power washing. That's anything less than about 300 psi. To give you an idea of psi, your house water hose is probably 100, maybe 120 psi. That's powers per square inch. So about twice what your water hose puts out at home is okay. Anything more than that is a good chance to damage the stone. Most power washers are 3,02500 psi. You can carve marble at that. So soft bristle brushes, big fan of what we don't like and we never recommend sandblasting, high pressure washing, grinders, or wire brushes. I'll cover each of those. All right. We never use any wire brushes, nilox brushes, or power equipment. There is no reason to use power equipment to clean these stones. Look, if you want this stone to be clean in 45 seconds, you are doing it wrong. It's not going to happen. The stone didn't get dirty in five minutes. It's not going to get clean in five minutes. It probably got dirty over 20, 30 years. Patience. All of these things are damaging. The way they work, some of you may be going, well, who would ever do this? Lots and lots of people. So the way that wire brushes and nilox brushes work is you actually erode the top layer of stone off. That's why when you're done it looks so clean because everything, all the soiling and all the surface, you just now erode it off. What we do know is that makes a more reactive surface than what you had before because if you get a microscope out there and you look at it, what you have now is a greater surface area. So more surface area is going to bring in more biological growth. You have more area to be affected by rain and things like that. So we know and it's not a hypothetical thing. We know this. That does increase the deterioration in the future and decrease the longevity of that stone. I mentioned earlier, not a big fan of pressure washing, especially brownstone, sandstone, marble. All of these things, a standard commercial power washer can absolutely carve through this. Now, if you see someone power washing, don't assume that they're out there just destroying everything. There are lots of power washers now that can be tuned and dialed down and people are modifying them and that sort of thing. So maybe go out and talk to them and say, hey, that was your clean and what kind of pressure you guys using. And one of the things a lot of monument dealers use high pressure washing for new granite monuments is to hold up to that. The historic other stones, they can't. So I've had people tell me, I went out and yelled at this guy, this monument dealer. Yeah, be careful with that. So bleach and acids bad all the way around. The reason these work, so marble limestone sandstones are really acid sensitive. So in the past, people used hydrochloric and myriadic acid to clean. And the way that works, it actually just eats that surface coating completely off. So there again, we now have a new, more reactive surface, but we've also eroded the surface. We've probably done the equivalent of 30 to 50 years worth of natural weathering with that one cleaning. So we know that's a bad thing. We know that's greatly shortening the life of the stone. So bleach is bad. The other reason that bleach is bad, so what I was just talking about was acids and how they work and why they're bad. The way that bleach works and why it's bad is, and this is an easy experiment. If you ever want to do it at home, it's fun. Take a clear glass or a bowl or a dish that's clear, pour a little bit of bleach in it, sit it in the window sill and leave it. What will happen is as the moisture evaporates off, the bleach will recrystallize. You'll get chlorine crystals. As those grow, they will, you'll see them in the bowl. They'll be these really nice little crystals in the bottom. That's going to happen on the inside of your stone. When it does, it's going to push apart that stone and cause that sugaring that we looked at earlier. So doing no harm, gentlest means necessary, perform a small test before you clean the whole stone, see if it's going to work. Exercise patience, what's the manufacturer's recommendation, and what's the manufacturer's safety guidance. If they say you need to wear gloves and glasses, then wear gloves and glasses. Be safe about it and you don't want to be out there and get it in your eye or maybe you're very sensitive and it burns your hands, that sort of thing. So follow that. And I'm a big fan, you know, natural bristle brushes. I like natural bristle over nylon, but nylon is fine. Just be cognizant that as nylon wears down, they become stiffer. So as it wears down, you've got to kind of toss them and not use them. It looks like I've misspelled nylox, so sorry about that. So for cleaning, always follow the manufacturer's soft bristle brushes, never wire brushes or nylox, never power equipment or grinders or sand or any of that. So always soak the stone before cleaning. Start cleaning from the bottom and working your way up. That sounds counterintuitive. When I first was in grad school and was interested in cemeteries, I read Lynette Strenson's guide to cemetery preservation primer and she said that and I thought, well, that doesn't make any sense. So I tried it on two stones, one I cleaned from the top and went down and one I cleaned from the bottom and I worked up. And it was like, oh my gosh, she was right. It is. It does. It absolutely works. Small circular motions and lots of water. And when I say lots of water, I want to see this stone wet and I want to see it rinsed well when I'm done. So what if you don't have water? I see someone already. Debbie from Owens, Maryland already asked me that. So I'll answer Debbie's question. There's lots and lots of things you can do to get water. National Guard and Fire Department in your community usually have what are called water buffaloes. These are large trailers with a water tank on it. Ask them, hey, we're going to have a cleaning day. Can you come out? The answer is almost always yes. A lot of, if you're in a rural community with farming, a lot of farmers have ag tanks. Just make sure water is all they've used in their ag tank. Easily, you can bring five gallon buckets with you. You can bring jugs with you, clean a few at a time. I talk to people who say, well, I'd like to clean when it's raining. Sure. If you know what's going to rain, you're out there, still bring some water with you, that kind of thing. Me personally, I work in a lot of cemeteries with no water. So I have in the back of my truck 40 gallon trash cans. They're super cheap. I drill a hole in the bottom of them. I put a little hose tap on them. And then I can actually run a water hose out if it's still lower. And I put four of them in. That's a lot of water, 40 gallons at a time, four of them. That's all the water I'm going to need for the day. Usually I don't need nearly that much. I have this back up. So there's lots of easy ways. Backpack sprayers full of water. I worked at a site one time that we did a big cleaning and they had the juvenile delinquents from the detention center run us a daisy chain of water several blocks away. And like I said, this is something that can be easily done by volunteers. This is photographs from Shell Met National Cemetery that we did a big volunteer project. We had, gosh, 800 and some volunteers. We cleaned, like, I forgot how many thousands of graves. I want to say it was like 12,000 graves. I'm forgetting the exact number now. So easy. You see all the kids in these photographs. We didn't have water on site. So they're using backpack sprayers and they're using hand pump sprayers to get the job done. So definitely something that can be done with volunteers. This is included. This is part of the handout, so I won't go over it. But a lot of the stuff is in that as well. Upcoming training is also in it. Okay. I'm going to park it here and head over to the questions. So this is a good time if you have questions for me to ask. And I think I'm going to be talking about reading some off, but I'm going to start reading some of these. I am happy to help send me pictures. Emails way better than phone calls. I travel a lot, so phone calls aren't always the best. But definitely interested in emails and send pictures. All right. So I'm going to head over to the questions. I'm going to go from the bottom and work my way up if that's all right. Jason, do you want me to ask? So one of the questions Cindy asked, why I work from the bottom and go up like I'm doing with the questions. So what actually happens is as you have a cleaner surface, the dirty water running down is less apt to absorb into it. You'll have to trust me on that or go try it on something if you like. But if you have a dirty surface, the water running down will actually absorb into it. And that actually becomes a harder surface than to clean. So all right. So Sarah from Philadelphia says, do you need glasses and gloves? Do you really want to use it? Yeah, absolutely. If you look at every cleaner you use in your home, they recommend glasses and gloves. If you're doing it by yourself and you know you're not sensitive to it, that's your own judgment call. If you're doing it in a group, I don't care if you're spraying water. I recommend you wearing glasses. The reason is everyone's getting down. They're kneeling down. They're going to spray each other in the face. It happens all the time. So I'm a big fan of glasses and gloves. I wear my glasses all the time anyway. So for me, it's always there. I do have safety glasses that are prescription than I wear. And gloves becomes a personal, hey, you're an adult. I've been using this product. Do I really still need the gloves? To be safe, especially if you've got volunteers, always glasses and gloves. Okay, so Debbie, I think I kind of went over some of the no-water source suggestions. So, yeah. So with Fay, you were saying, you know, even if you don't tell the news at large, shouldn't we tell the descendant community, local members of the community? Yeah, that's probably a good point. Yeah, I agree. You know, if you have a community newsletter or, you know, but it's going to get out. So the biggest thing is to hit it immediately. You know, get on that as soon as you can and try to get that taken care of. Christina from Tupelo says they've used D2 for cleaning. D2 is my personal favorite. I use D2 for most all by cleaning. It's generally what I teach with, but there are other really good products out there. We've done testing with D2. Someone says, Caitlin from Minnesota says isn't cleaning damaging. Not if it's done right. Yes, on a micro scale, you are going to dislodge some grains. There's nothing we can do about that. Of course, the only way is not to touch it at all. But we've actually done quite a bit of studying and found we could find no measurable damage from cleaning with soft bristle brushes and the right cleaners on a good solid stone. So the big thing is if you've got a stone that is already sugaring, I don't care what cleaner you use. If you touch it, you're going to bring the surface off. So that's a big decision to make. Maybe the decision is, and a lot of times it should be, just to leave it alone. Just to say, hey, this stone is too deteriorated. We're not going to clean it. If you've got a brownstone that is flaking or a sandstone that is flaking that's got microcracks, leave it alone. Don't go scrubbing on it. If you tap real lightly and you can hear a hollow sound, you've probably got some delamination of the stone. And I probably should have stuck a slide in there and explained that. But you've probably got thin pieces of stone coming away. Brownstone and sandstone are really bad for this. If I'm going to clean it for some reason, if I need to clean this, what I will do is something like D2. I will spray water on the surface. I will let it dry to the touch. I will spray D2 and I will let it sit and dwell for a long time and then maybe rinse it off. And the reason is, without touching it, it's going to help. So Debra from Texas says, what variety tools do you say are most common for cleaning kits for groups? I like what are called peanut brushes, which are natural bristle brushes that are about 8 inches long, sort of a funny peanut shape. Those are my favorite. But then I also use very small ones that you can buy that are the little heads only, maybe 2 inches square to get into the carvings. I also like using bamboo skewers, like you use for shish kebabs, to get into lettering and to get into detailed carvings to brushes work rate, getting some or even bottle brushes. Because you will find sometimes carvings that actually have a recess, so you can actually stick bottle brushes, that sort of thing in there. What product should be used for biological growth cleaning? Yeah, so D2 is a really good one. That's a cleaner used for biological growth. MODEC is another one. Revive is another one. BioWash has changed its name, so I can't remember it off the top of my head. But yeah, there's several good ones out there. All right, so Michelle from Ontario. What do you recommend for resetting ground markers? I've been using limestone dust. Yeah, yeah. So for resetting, that's a little higher than what we were going to get into in this, but since you ask, I will answer, Michelle. So you dig a hole bigger than what you need. I like to put back in sharp gravel, not rounded gravel, but sharp gravel. Limestone dust is great and really just tamp it in and pack it in really good. I don't use metal tampers. I use 2x4s. That way if I slip up, I'm not going to hit the stone and damage it. But limestone dust is a good call. So Shannon from Huntington, Indiana. Great question. How do you go about gaining permission and who do you contact before beginning a project? Thank you, Shannon. That is an excellent question. One I should have. Oh, and Jennifer Moss just asked basically the same questions and Jeff from Houston. So anytime you're at a cemetery, before you do anything, short of taking photographs, let me back up. You can photograph a site and document it without written permission and that sort of thing. Unless a site specifically has a rule that says no documentation and I've actually seen that. But it's rare and that's usually an active cemetery that is currently being controlled maybe by a church or a corporation, that sort of thing, but that's really rare. And you probably don't need to document there anyway because there are new active cemeteries. I've never run across in 20 years any of the abandoned cemeteries that had any sort of rule on that. So you can definitely photograph and in a lot of states it's very important. I did some work in Kentucky and it's sort of a part of a mining regulation. If a site has proved abandoned for so long, they can run an ad and a paper and it could be a tiny little ad that runs for a day. They wait 30 days, they can take the cemetery and demolish it and move the mine that way. The SHPO there says, you know, the biggest thing is if you even have a single photograph that was taken, it proves the site's not abandoned. So that makes documentation so important on sites like that. And I didn't mention this earlier, we talked about sharing it. Someone said, what about Find a Grave? Find a Grave is a fantastic website. I had its link in my PowerPoint, findagrave.com. Stick your pictures on there. That shows that people are there. Send them to the SHPO if you document. Your SHPO is your State Historic Preservation Office. If you're doing documentation, send a copy there. I bet your local site has a genealogical library in your town. Send a copy there. Share those I talked about. So back to the cleaning. You need to know you have permission. You can't just randomly go clean people's graves because you think it's a good idea. And this happens all the time. If it's your own family, you're good to go. If you're being hired by a family to do it or asked by a family, if you're a genealogist from somewhere else and you say, hey, so this is your family, you're giving me permission and they say absolutely, then you're good. You got the good faith effort that they really truly had permission and you're going out and doing it, you're going to be fine. If you're just taking on a site because you feel like it's abandoned or that's such a cool stone, I want to clean it, you need to have permission. You need to find out who controls the cemetery. Is it a church? Is it the city? Is it a nonprofit group? Find out who owns and controls the site and then go to them and say, hi, here's what I propose. Tell them what grave you want to clean, tell them what you're cleaning with, and then go from there. But make sure you have permission because, yeah, the good Samaritan rule doesn't really apply if someone comes up and says, hey, wait a minute, I didn't want you doing that or I didn't want you doing that with that sort of the way you did it or whatever. So let's see, what else? Okay, metal markers. Do you worry about removing patina and opening up the underlying metal to further deterioration? Yes. So when you're working on metal markers, I wouldn't recommend anything but a very soft bristle brush and water just to remove soiling on it, like bird droppings and spider webs and that sort of thing. Otherwise, it's time to call a professional in. So a soft bristle brush and water, depending on if the water on your site is really bad and your cleaning metal, maybe deionized water, something like that, you should be fine. You have a lot of varieties of mosses in Anchorage. What should you use? So any of the biological growth cleaners that we talked about, like D2 or MODEC or Revive, they're going to kill that moss. And someone asked earlier about green circular mossy growth. That's probably a lichen. A lichen's come off pretty easy with a brush and water. So yeah. Jason, what about wet and forget? What was that question again? Wet and forget is the product. Okay. So the question keeps coming up, what about wet and forget? We have not tested wet and forget. On paper, it is a quaternary ammonium compound. So it is very similar to other cleaners that we do like. I can't speak directly to it because I've not used it nor have I tested it. On paper seems to be, you know, it seems to be okay. But like I said, I've not used it. So I can't really say, yeah, try that. Yeah, hoping to give it a little look at that and see before we can recommend it. D2, let's see. So Linda asked, is that curbing or coping? So coping is, curbing and coping are sort of analogous terms. They're about the same. Curbing is a little bit different. Cribbing is around a single grave. Coping and curbing are around larger sites. Technically coping is what you call it unless it's near the roadway and then it becomes curbing. But people throw those two terms around pretty much the same. So Lee from Hayes, Kansas says, in relation to curbing and curbing, what about cornerstones for a plot? So cornerstones are important. So again, that is part of the historic landscape. That becomes part of the look of that site. You know, definitely clean those and document those, reset them if you need to, but try to hang on to them because, you know, someone put them there on purpose, that becomes part of the look of the site. And while you're getting ready to answer this last one, I will make sure that any unanswered questions that we get answers, and I'll post them along with the recording. And I'll also add to the handout a few things that I see are missed, and I'll also ask Jason to give me sources for prunet brushes and that kind of stuff. Okay. So Victoria in Iowa City said, are cemeteries in national parks protected and cleaned by the park? Yes. So if they're in a national park, there are 14 national cemeteries that are owned by the National Park Service and then countless other parks that have family cemeteries or miscellaneous graves that probably were earlier to the site. So yes, those are all protected and controlled by the park, and you cannot come in and do cleaning or repairs if they're owned by the National Park Service. The same if they're, the sites owned by the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, and the same if they're owned by the Fish and Wildlife or Forestry Department. So those are federal property, and you can't really come in and start cleaning. However, if you go and talk to them, talk to the maintenance staff, they may have cleanup days. They may not know that anyone cares about a site. If you are related to those people, for example, I'm from Wilkes County, North Carolina. Originally, my family has graves that are now part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. If they needed it, I would absolutely go and say, hi, these are my family members. What can I do about it and have that discussion with them? So all right, how do we obtain the recording of this webinar? I'll let the webinar answer that. I'll post the recording in a few days. Once you don't see the ad for this on the main page of our website, then you'll be able to find the recording in the archives. And I will also post the handout on any trailing questions. So it'll all be there in one place. Okay, looks like I got time for a couple more. Okay, along the same line, is it okay to do an untrained person what isn't? Resetting stones, cleaning, okay. If you're an untrained person, of course someone trained should probably oversee any of the work. And there's lots of... I've posted training classes that I'm doing. Association of Grades and Studies those training classes. I'll be teaching one of those classes with Jonathan Appel, the one at Gloucester. Jonathan teaches classes. There are groups that teach classes. And you're welcome to drop me an email if you have questions about who's teaching that sort of thing. A lot of the SHPO offices, the State Historic Preservation Offices, have started teaching very good classes. Texas does, Arkansas does, Rusty Brenner does classes in Texas and Arkansas. So someone should probably be trained. I shouldn't say probably. Someone should be trained. And then they should oversee volunteers. So cleaning is an easy one. Landscape maintenance is an easy one. Resetting stones, yeah. I mean, if someone has training, that's something that can definitely be led by a trained person with volunteers and done well. Of course documentation. I'm not a big fan of getting repair work done. You need training before you go out to try to do any repair work. So, I mean, definitely. And Susan, just threw a plug-in for the Kickstart webinar next week. Absolutely. Like I said, the biggest question I always get is, how do I get money for my cemetery? That's a good way to start. So Sarah in Philadelphia says reselling of granite markers is also done. Yipes. I've not run across that, Sarah. I hate that you have. That's a lot of work. It's one thing to take an urn. It's another to take a whole granite marker. So, wow. Deborah from Martin Dale, Texas says question for the end. Do funeral homes keep records of these funeral plaques? Maybe not many years ago, but maybe in the most recent years. So to answer Deborah's question is, they should. Does it mean that they always do? A good funeral home absolutely does. They have records, but it doesn't mean they all do. I've worked with several funeral homes that had no records and sometimes for unscrupulous reasons. So don't assume that they do. Yeah. Just don't assume that they do. But ideally, yes, they should. And ideally, they should for long periods of time, but it doesn't always mean they do. And yeah, unfortunately, a lot of times there's no, you know, there's not record where we think there should be. All right. Any last question? Has anyone used headstone cleaner by clean logic? A long time ago. So it was fine then. I haven't checked on to see if it's changed anyway. There are a few more questions here, but I will collect them and give them to Jason to answer in writing. And as I said, I'll post a missed trailing question. All right. This is fabulous. And so don't forget next week. All of our webinars are free. Just keep an eye on the website and you'll see the ads as I have them ready. And I'll post the recording, the PowerPoint slides, the handouts and the trailing questions in the next few days. So thank you, Jason. I think that that's it. Thank you, everyone. Well, thank you. And everybody email me if you need anything. And excited to see someone from Moravian Falls on here. Went to high school there. Wow. Small world. There you go. Great. Yeah. So thank you very much. I know that in one of my family, Greg, that's very, very remote. People removed all of the marble sheathing and sold it. Okay. So thank you. We'll see you next week. And thank you, Jason, so much.