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I spoke to a lady who whose family had hired an engraver to come to the cemetery and add some additional information to their grandmother’s stone. They were adding her date of death and a nickname.ÂDoing that work on site is not for the faint of heart. It involves expensive sandblasting equipment, sandblast resistant stencils, protective equipment, and a lot of precise measurement. If you make a mistake, it is literally carved in stone.Here is a link to a YouTube video that shows the process.ÂI wouldn’t want to do it myself and won’t criticize anyone who tackles it.The family’s only issue was that the new work had some dark marks or staining on the stone surrounding the characters.
This was a word-of-mouth report, so I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I could do about it until I saw it. So I made a trip out to the cemetery.
This is a cemetery that I drive past almost every day, but I’d never stopped to visit it.
It is quite old (for our area). Most of it sits on the side of a hill. There are about 1,000+ burials there.
I hadn’t gotten any information about where the gravesite was in the cemetery, so I had to do some tromping up and down the hill, but it eventually turned up.
If you look at the picture above, you’ll see some of what they were talking about. One interesting thing about this stone is that it wasn’t polished inside the box where the engraving lives, so the surface of the stone in that area is a little rough. That may have caused it to hold some adhesive from the stencil or overspray from the paint used to highlight the letters.
I tested a small area and cleaned it with a little detergent in a lot of water. (Granite headstones are very hard and durable. The detergent that I use for these is often used as a shampoo for horses.)
The end result was pretty good, even if it wasn’t particularly dramatic.
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Since I was at this new-to-me cemetery, I took the opportunity to wander around and take some photos that had been requested for FindAGrave. It led to a couple of interesting discoveries that we’ll talk about next time.