EAST HAVEN

The Old Cemetery Board in East Haven is continuing its efforts to restore historical headstones at the namesake burial grounds based off the recent acquisition of $30,000 in capital expenditures, furthering its effort to preserve what board members see as an underappreciated representation of the town’s history.

The Old Cemetery, which is located across from the Town Green, is the grounds where the names of significant figures in the town’s history can be found, from Heminway to Tuttle to Thompson. This makes the restoration of the stones bearing those names an important task, according to Judy Ruggiero, a member of the cemetery’s board.

“They have street names because they were the founders of East Haven,” she said. “You’re looking at the history of East Haven—how it started, who started it—and most people don’t realize that. They just look at it and say, ‘Oh well, it's a cemetery,’ and that's all there is to it. But if they go inside and read the inscriptions on the headstones, they can get a good grasp of who their streets are named after and why they're named after them. Without that information, they have no idea what they’re missing in history.”

Bob Sand, the chairperson of the Old Cemetery Board, said the reasons for the $30,000 relate to restoring dilapidated headstones which were subject to vandalism, damage from fallen tree branches, or have naturally faded throughout the course of multiple centuries.

Since the stones are made of sandstone, rather than granite or concrete, “they break very easily,” said Sand.

“If somebody leans on it a little bit, they’re laying in the grass. I got tired of looking at our landscaper driving over stones, so we took the opportunity, and I've got the contractor in here now, and we flagged all the locations that we wanted taken care of,” he said.

Sand said that Benny’s Masonry is the contractor which is working with the board. They have assigned numbers to broken headstones in order to accurately locate them throughout the burial grounds to be fixed and, if needed, have their respective bases filled, too.

One significant factor of this effort is identifying which names belong to each of the broken stones, including those which have been “wearing away,” said Sand. For accuracy in pinpointing their appropriate location within the grounds, Sand said it is difficult for the cemetery board to rely upon its inventory of names at the burial grounds since “it's only in alphabetical order.”

Sand added: “It doesn't give me a location, so I can't pinpoint that [a broken stone] was next to ‘Sarah.”’

Some stones present challenges, including a series of brownstones which were damaged during a flood and are now lined up toward the back of the cemetery.

“There’s no bodies under those stones,” Ruggiero said. “Those stones are just there because they were retrieved after the flood.”

Caskets which were lifted up from the flood were placed back into the ground, but they were not placed underneath “a proper stone because there was no way to identify who they were,” said Ruggiero.

To fulfill this void in accuracy, the cemetery board is looking to use some of its capital funds to make a map of the cemetery. This part of the project, which will come further down the line, is also considering the support of local students to bolster accuracy in location, said Sand.

“I was trying to get some students from this high school with drones to take the aerial part of it and to see if we can't match up what they have and then actually make a map and then identify the stones based on that,” he said.

Sand said that, ultimately, “The idea is that we can put something together that we could identify who it was.”

“We’re attempting to piece together what we can. It’s like a puzzle to see if we can’t find the pieces,” he said.

Sand added that finding the accurate location of stones, along with what family they should be with, will fulfill the “gaps in the history” which have occurred due to stone deterioration.

This restoration and preservation effort is a continuation of what the Old Cemetery Board has been doing for over 10 years, a time during which it has repaired 229 stones through work supported from fundraising efforts, according to Sand. The goal for the new capital funding from the town is to restore 88 stones.

Sand said that “it’s our community’s responsibility to preserve” the cemetery not just for its historic ties to East Haven, but for relatives of those who are buried at the cemetery to accurately locate their ancestors within the grounds. The creation of a system of accuracy by way of mapping the grounds could provide a big help to those seeking the names of people from their family.

“The problem is that you don't know where in the cemetery, by a section or by a row, where this stone actually is,” said Sand. “If we don't make that happen, people won't come in, because if they have a relative, and it says it's in the cemetery, do they have the time to look at all these markings? We're trying to lead people to find a relative or [their] ancestry.”