PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — In the pursuit of preserving local history, a University of Maine at Presque Isle professor and her team are mapping and photographing 15,000 Aroostook County gravestones by October.
Thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, University of Maine at Presque Isle history professor Kimberly Sebold will expand her “History in Stones” project to help preserve the cemeteries of central Aroostook County.
Over the last two years, Sebold and her crew have scoured every headstone in about 40 of Aroostook’s roughly 50 cemeteries — from large sites to small family plots — to document information about the deceased. The results are a series of searchable story maps which Sebold plans to make available not only to the public, but to eighth-grade classes when they study Maine history.
Sebold’s team includes fellow teachers, as well as former and current students, both from UMPI and the University of Maine in Orono, and has even worked with students from local high schools who are fulfilling community service hours.
She said she did not expect to receive the grant.
“I was definitely surprised,” Sebold said. “I kind of just said ‘We’ll try it and see what happens.’ I was very pleasantly surprised. The fact that we got the whole $50,000 was great, because they don’t have to give you the whole amount, and that was the most we could get.”
Sebold will use the funds to hire more UMPI students, teachers and local historians to help with mapping, archiving and research. She has three students writing story maps for photographed headstones, and hopes to increase that number. She aims to tackle mapping and photographing 15,000 gravestones in Caribou and Fort Fairfield between May and October.
Sebold has long been interested in local history and exploring how people from the area fit into larger historical events, as well as how they affected the people and the community as a whole.
She had planned to work with regional social studies teachers in order to create a local history program beginning in fall 2020. But the COVID-19 pandemic interfered and the effort was canceled.
She took this as a call to action to combine her passion for local history and her fascination with cemeteries to create a documenting and mapping program, and her “History in Stones” project was born.
Sebold and her team go through cemeteries and clean all the stones, helping to unearth those that have sunk into the ground. They then record latitude and longitude and write down everything written on the headstone.
Team members research each person and write information about their life into an easy-to-understand presentation where the reader can learn about that individual’s life, and their impact in the community.
The cemeteries are recorded using a system called ArcGIS, which is a mapping program that can also be used to analyze data. Police departments use the same program in order to map areas where crime occurs and identify hotspots for patrol. School systems will be able to access this service for free in order to use story maps for lesson plans.
The project has received funding from other sources as well, including a Maine
Humanities Council Major Grant and the Donald and Linda G. Zillman Family Professorship.
