A Rainy Sunday Engaging with Dead People
Chris and I have volunteered for a lot of things over the years, but “spend your Sunday deciphering 150-year-old tombstone engravings in the drizzle” was a new one — and honestly, one of the more oddly satisfying ways we’ve spent a weekend day.
The occasion was a Cemetery Documentation Workshop hosted by Save Our Cemeteries, working in St. Joseph’s Cemetery #1 here in New Orleans. The mission was simple: walk the grounds, find graves that were missing photos, GPS coordinates, or life dates on Find a Grave, and fill in the gaps. It’s the kind of quiet, unglamorous work that adds up — genealogists, historians, and total strangers searching for long-lost relatives depend on volunteers doing exactly this.
If you’ve never spent time in a New Orleans cemetery, here’s the thing that gets you every time: almost nobody’s underground. The water table here is too high, so families built up instead — rows of above-ground tombs, some over a century old, packed together like a tiny stone city. Walking through it doesn’t feel like a cemetery so much as a very old, very quiet neighborhood.
The weather did not cooperate. It was grey, it drizzled on and off, and we did most of our documenting in the gaps between raindrops, clipboards going soggy, squinting at names half-erased by a hundred years of rain. Which led to the most on-brand moment of the day: Chris and I standing in front of the exact same tombstone, both squinting at the exact same weathered inscription, and reading two completely different names out loud. Neither of us was right. We eventually agreed to disagree and moved on.
No wild names, no scandalous family drama uncovered — just careful, slow work. By the end of the day we’d logged close to 40 grave sites between us, most of which now have photos and dates that weren’t there before. A lot of that data has already been approved and is live on Find a Grave, which means somewhere out there, someone searching for a relative is going to find what they’re looking for a little faster because of a rainy Sunday and two guys squinting at the same eroded letter, trying to decide if it was an “O” or a shadow.
If you’re in New Orleans and looking for a genuinely interesting way to spend a few hours, keep an eye out for Save Our Cemeteries’ next documentation day. Bring a raincoat.
