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Subject: [MAWORCES] Gravestone photo collection enters Internet age
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2004 20:45:22 EST

Sunday, January 4, 2004

Gravestone photo collection enters Internet age

By Pamela H. Sacks
T&G Staff





A picturesque image from the Farber collection.
Enlarge photo





FROM AN 18th-CENTURY GRAVESTONE
My Trembling Heart with Grief overflows,
While I Record the death of Those;
Who died by Thunder Sent from Heaven,
In Seventeen hundred and Seventy Seven

Abraham Rice, struck by lightening, 1777, Framingham, Massachusetts

WORCESTER -- Jessie Lie Farber likes to say the gravestone is a form of
America's earliest sculpture.

``It's a truly American folk art, of interest to social and art historians,''
she said. ``It's a way of depicting complex ideas about time and death
through symbols.''

In an essay, Mrs. Farber pointed out that, while other artifacts have been
moved to museums, gravestones are unique in that ``each is dated and most are
found in their original settings.''

``An American colonist, reincarnated and walking through the streets of his
hometown today, would be hard put to find anything he recognized except the
town's old burying ground,'' Mrs. Farber wrote. ``There, he would see stones he
knew, still grouped by family and bearing familiar names and verses.''

Yet it is that unique circumstance that has put these artifacts in harm's
way. Subject to the ravages of weather and pollution, many have become difficult
to read; others are crumbling.

More than 30 years ago, Mrs. Farber's husband, the Worcester photographer Dan
Farber, developed a fascination with gravestones and started to photograph
them. By the late 1970s, he had been joined by his wife; the couple had met
through their mutual interest in the markers, particularly those dating back to
the 17th and 18th centuries. She assisted him, often selecting the most
interesting ones. Together, they took hundreds of photographs.

As the collection grew, the Farbers realized that they were creating a
historically important record, so they made prints and donated them to the American
Antiquarian Society, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Yale University.

But it was Mr. Farber who recognized a real opportunity with the advent of
the digital age. He knew the photographs of those grave markers and the
documentation that had been collected on each one should be ``on the computer,'' Mrs.
Farber said.

When Mr. Farber died in 1997 at the age of 92, his wife carried on the quest.
Two months ago, their vision became reality: 13,500 images of more than 9,000
gravestones and all known documentation about each one went online, available
to all free of charge at www.davidrumsey.com/farber.

The task was accomplished thanks in large measure to the assistance and
generosity of David Rumsey, a member of the American Antiquarian Society's board of
governors. The owner of one of the largest private collections of rare 18th-
and 19th-century maps, Mr. Rumsey had formed Cartography Associates, a digital
publishing company, to put his own assemblage online.

``I joined the board of the Antiquarian Society to help them with digital
projects,'' Mr. Rumsey said by telephone from his office in San Francisco. ``I
asked them, `Well, let's see, what can we do to get some online collections
going? What do you have?' ''

Ellen S. Dunlap, the society's president, didn't miss a beat. The Farber
photographs, along with gravestone pictures taken in the 1920s by Harriette
Merrifield Forbes -- like Mr. Farber, a Worcester resident -- and in the 1950s by
Dr. Ernest Caulfield of Connecticut, already had been digitized by Mrs. Farber's
son, Henry Lie, a conservator at Harvard University's Fogg Museum. In the
mid-1990s, a Colorado company had produced a collection of 11 compact discs, but
had been unprepared to market it, Ms. Dunlap said.

Mr. Rumsey found the quality of the photography to be outstanding. He and his
staff took a month to set up the site, using Luna Imaging's Insight software,
which is designed specifically for researching art collections.

The Farber Gravestone Collection was launched in November and immediately
prompted a flurry of activity.

``We literally had thousands of visitors every day for weeks,'' Mr. Rumsey
said. ``They were coming from genealogy and educational sites and from the
general public. We want people to use it, so it's rewarding.''

Ms. Dunlap said that the site is a marvel to use. It allows the viewer to
bring several images together for comparison and to group them in clusters. A
query can be made by a name, location, date, carver and even a type of decorative
carving. It allows a viewer to zoom in and see minute detail. Additionally,
comments and observations can be recorded, a feature that opens the door to
collaboration among researchers.

Mr. Rumsey also has provided software that allows editing of the text and
additions to be made to the site from Worcester. ``They will probably add images
from time to time,'' he said.

Mr. Rumsey is enthusiastic about posting collections online in part because
of the web of connections it creates. ``Stanford University has a gravestone
image collection and has already expressed an interest in the site,'' he said.

It is fitting that the American Antiquarian Society should be the vehicle
through which the collection is now widely accessible. Its library brought the
Farbers together.

She was teaching at Mount Holyoke College when gravestones first caught her
eye. He, meanwhile, had been photographing the artifacts for years. Mrs. Farber
remembered that she was told: ``There's a man in Worcester who has taken
loads of photographs, and they're at the American Antiquarian Society.''

``I had a lot of curiosity,'' she said. ``I could not understand what I was
seeing -- the designs, the way things were spelled, like `dafter' for daughter.
So many odd and interesting things were on the stones.''

At the society's library, she asked to see Dan Farber's photos. She was asked
in return, ``Which ones?'' There were boxes and boxes of them.

She and Mr. Farber met soon afterward, and they started photographing
gravestones together. He proposed a year later, in 1978.

``He said, `Let's get married and do this all the time,' '' she recalled with
a laugh. ``We were absolutely surrounded by these artifacts -- here and all
over New England.''

While Mrs. Forbes and Dr. Caulfield were early leaders in gravestone
photography, Mr. Farber also made an important contribution to the technical aspects
of the craft.

It can be difficult to obtain the right lighting for a picture because the
stones are often located in the shade of trees, where the sunlight hits the
surface for only a short period of time, or not at all. In any case, the lighting
has to be just right to pick up the inscription and decorative carvings. Mr.
Farber developed a technique by which he used a mirror to reflect controlled
sunlight on shaded stones.

``If it wasn't lighted right, he'd rather come back another day,'' Mrs.
Farber said.

For her part, Mrs. Farber encouraged enlarging the geographical scope of the
collection and the amount of data that was amassed. She has a particular
interest in the markers of early America.

Not surprisingly, the shapes, styles and wording of gravestones changed
markedly over the centuries.

``We see the sternness of the 17th century replaced by the 18th-century `Age
of Reason,' and the 19th's extravagance, love of nature and free expression of
sentiment. The 20th, by comparison, is secular, straightforward and
businesslike,'' Mrs. Farber wrote in her essay, which is on the Web site and offers a
wealth of detailed information.

Together, the Farbers photographed gravestones for 20 years.

``Guess who was holding the mirror?'' Mrs. Farber asked with a chuckle.

She went on to say that she hardly found that to be a hardship.

``I think that was such a great time Dan and I had,'' she said. ``There were
a lot of people we knew who were interested. They would say, `Isn't it ever
going to be more available?' I really wanted these to get on the computer.''

She then turned to Ms. Dunlap and, with a broad smile, inquired: ``Didn't I
pester you?''

``This is what Dan and Jessie always wanted,'' Ms. Dunlap affirmed. Pamela
Sacks can be reached at .

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