Back to the Drawing Board

The biggest challenge about the Brevard County Historic Cemetery Recording Project is coming across a site that is inaccessible. It happened to me first with Davis Memorial Cemetery, and then again with the two Malabar Cemeteries. This means that the sites have sadly been lost to time. The central purpose of this project is to record these historic cemeteries to the Florida Master Site File, which in turn will help preserve them and avoid these very scenarios. I cannot help but feel a sense of defeat when I cannot access a site due to dense foliage and unsafe or inaccessible roads. However, the show must go on, as there are plenty of sites that have yet to be recorded.

This past week, I had to go back to the drawing board and find some new cemeteries to replace the inaccessible sites from my original list. After some research, I confirmed that all of these sites are easily accessible and they each have under 1,000 graves, which is perfect for my comparative study. The updated list of sites that I will be using for my project is as follows:

Historic African American Cemeteries
J.S. Stone Memorial Cemetery (Melbourne)
White Lily Cemetery (Merritt Island)
J.N. Tucker Memorial Cemetery (Melbourne)
Line Street Cemetery (Melbourne)

Historic Caucasian Cemeteries
Georgiana Cemetery (Merritt Island)
Grant Community Cemtery (Grant)
St. Luke's Episcopal Church Cemetery (Merritt Island)
Indianola Cemetery (Merritt Island)

I spent the week doing some research on these sites, such as addresses, owners, and their history. I am quite curious about the Indianola Cemetery, as there is a rich history to the area and there are quite a few prominent pioneer families interred there. Here is a wonderful article from Senior Scene Magazine that discusses the cemetery and beautifully tells the story of some of those who are buried there.

This past Thursday, I wrapped up my reports for Melbourne Cemetery, J.S. Stone Memorial Cemetery and Oaklawn Memorial Gardens. The only thing left to do is to attach a map of the property to the report using Photoshop. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I have yet to master this popular photo editing software, but I have been watching online tutorials this past weekend in an attempt to better familiarize myself with it. Hopefully, I can get these maps done by Wednesday so that I can then move on to the fun part: data collection!

Sometime in the next two weeks, I will begin the data collecting portion of my project. This means I will be going to the above sites, and recording information pertaining to each individual grave such as the name on the headstone, the type of marker used, the type of material used, and any threats or maintenance issues affecting it. I will need a few volunteers to assist me with this process so that it can be done in a timely fashion. If anyone is interested in helping out, please contact me at lareyne.ellebracht@knights.ucf.edu. This will be a great way to see firsthand the various factors that make historic cemetery preservation necessary. So if you are interested, please let me know. Also, if you know of someone else who may be interested in volunteering, please forward them my e-mail or re-post a link to my blog for others to see. The more, the merrier!

Until next week,
Lareyne