Simply put, students find early American gravestones fascinating. Students also get a lot out of studying gravestones. Gravestones not only provide students with a visceral sense of colonial New England culture, but also they give students visual markers to understand changes in New England theology.
Dean Eastman, David Watters, and other have provided rich ideas for how to use gravestones in the classroom. Unfortunately for those of us who teach in states outside of New England, it is difficult for our students to access early American cemeteries in person. While collections such as the Farber Collection have stunning photographs, these collections are more useful for analyses of individual stones, rather than patterns within a cemetery or comparisons between cemeteries. This means students often have little sense of whether a stone is representative of the way death was understood in a particular geographic or temporal era.
The Indian Converts database is designed to allow students outside of New England to have access to multiple stones from the same cemetery or town. These images are all zoomable, and thus can be more easily read by students. In addition, gravestones in the archive are hotlinked to relevant documents and images that provide a content for understanding each stone.
The archive allows students to compare gravestones within a cemetery and between cemeteries. For example, it provides extensive examples of gravestones from individual cemeteries within one New England town (Newport, RI) so that students can investigate how race and religion impact gravestone iconography and shape. The archive also provides a range of representative images from other New England cemeteries that students can use for less exhaustive seriation studies; these cemeteries include several colonial cemeteries in Martha's Vineyard and the Wampanoag Cemetery in Mashpee.
The gravestone exercises included in "Reading Gravestones" Study Guide are fairly complicated and are intended for college students in an American Studies classroom. If you teach at a secondary school, you may want to adapt these exercises so that they are appropriate for the students in your classroom. See the Sample Gravestone Goals Worksheet for ideas on how to use the study guides in the classroom. You will want to be realistic about how much students can accomplish in the time you give them. For example, more ambitious students who have a fair amount of class time dedicated to studying gravestones may want to complete the excel charts for their cemeteries. Classes that are spending one week or less on gravestones will probably prefer to use the simpler gravestone charts.
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