About The Tombstone Project
The Penobscot Tombstone Project started around 2008 as a result of a child's brief school homework assignment about
family genealogy. Having discovered that a number of long lost family members actually had lived and were buried in the Town
of Penobscot where i reside, I began researching and photographing the headstones of all my relatives i could locate within
Hancock County, Maine. It turned into one of the biggest hobbies that I could ever imagine, and went from photographing
relatives, to photographing whole cemeteries. In the process of researching family, I found it irritating that most everything on
the internet having to do with genealogy, turned into a site that someone wanted payment to, or a monthly subscription fee for,
to access family cemetery information.
The Tombstone Project is a collection of individual web pages linked to family cemeteries within Hancock County, Maine.
Photographs are taken in the warmer spring, summer, fall months and saved on an external hard drive, then uploaded to site
pages whenever time is available. There have been a number of people who have expressed intrest in the Tombstone Project
and have contrubuted photo's and information. There are also others who have documented cemeteries in their towns and
have their own individual sites in which links are then provided to access..
There is, with the creation of the this Tombstone Project, a hope that many other individuals or groups within individual towns
and cities, will photograph and document their cemeteries and put these photo's of the individual tombstones online for all to see.
Many stones from years past have fallen over , frost heaving them, neglected, some buried under years and years of grass and
leaves, others which were in once in fields over 100 years ago, are now in what is taken over by trees creating a forest, hiding
them forever. These Cemeteries should be cleaned and photographed, documented so as not to be lost forever.
Penobscot Maine alone has 68 cemeteries. Many of these cemeteries were unheard of until Bertha and Royden Bowden, took it
upon themselves to document all the cemeteries in town. It is with the help of their book "Cemeteries of Penbscot Maine " that the
Penobscot Tombstone Project was created. As of October 2011, over half of Penobscot's cemeteries have been uploaded to the
internet for viewing. The Tombstone Project has also documented a number of cemeteries in Blue Hill and Orland, and
hopefully will involve many other Towns within Hancock County Maine.
I would like to encourage any group of individuals including Local Historical Society's, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, or any others
to adopt a cemetery in their area, photograph and document the location of each stone and submit it to their local municipal
website for all to see. There are always sites out there trying to make a buck when genealogy research should be free.
To add your Maine Cemetery site to the Tombstone Project index,
or for help starting your own tombstone site, Contact: glenashe@yahoo.com
glenashe@yahoo.com
Glen Ashe, Penobscot, Maine