Description
Cemeteries, graveyards, and burial grounds in the United States are sites of memorial, celebration, and mourning as well as repositories of histories and information. As institutions of care and memory, it can be argued that these cities of the dead are curated spaces much like modern archives, which preserve, manage, and provide access to acquired personal papers, ephemera, and self-narratives. Inscriptions on headstones, the sizes and shapes of monuments, their proximate locations within the cemetery, who has been afforded burial within specific grounds, and the continued or discontinued existence or recognition of burial sites are all related to elements of an archival record. They exemplify who is permitted eternal, detailed, memory and who is often relegated to historical roles as supporting participants or marginalized to the point of erasure. If cemeteries are to be understood as a form of community archives, what are their institutional obligations regarding accessibility, care, and contextualized presentation of records; and how can archival professionals offer their expertise and experience to these tasks? Several questions this inquiry demands include working definitions of cemeteries and community archives, how are they alike and different, is there enough correlation between the two to consider cemeteries as a form of community archives, and how do the roles and responsibilities of each institution broadly interact and overlap with one another? There are cultural and historical distinctions between cemeteries, graveyards, and burial grounds, and their differences aid in the understanding of culturally recognized sites of burial as communal institutions of memory.