Collections: ags

Margaret R. Jenks has been a family genealogist since 1964 and a cemetery transcriber since 1978. A prolific writer, she has published books listing all the cemetery inscriptions of the twenty-seven towns in Rutland County, Vermont, and of Granville, Washington County, New York, and she has conducted research on the stonecarvers of Rutland County. She served six years as a trustee of the Association for Gravestone Studies.

The Jenks collection is comprised of eighteen volumes containing exhaustive documentation of gravestone inscriptions from the following cemeteries in Vermont: Benson, Brandon, Castleton, Chittenden, Clarendon, Danby, Fair Haven, Granville (Washington County), Hubbardston, Ira, Mendon, Middleton, Mount Holly, Mt. Tabor, Pawlet, Pittsfield, Pittsford, Poultney, Proctor, Putney, Rutland, Sherburne, Shrewsbury, Sudbury, Tinmouth, Wallingford, Wells, West Haven, West Rutland.

A former guest editor of the Association for Gravestone Studies Newsletter and member of the Wisconsin Old Cemeteries Society, Phil Kallas has researched and written on Wisconsin gravestones and stonecarvers.

The Kallas collection contains 37 postcards of cemeteries from ten states, ranging from Alaska to New York, plus a quantity of newsclippings and photocopies on gravestones and carvers.

An historian and photographer, Allan I. Ludwig’s book Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815 (1966) played a critical role in the rise in interest in gravestone studies in the 1960s. Born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1933, Ludwig received his PhD in art history from Yale in 1964 and became involved with the Association for Gravestone Studies beginning with the initial Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife in 1976. He received the AGS Forbes Award in 1980 in recognition of his contributions to gravestone studies. He has been a professor of art history at Dickinson College, Bloomfield College, Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, and Syracuse University. In addition to his books Reflections Out of Time: A Portfolio of Photographs (1981) and Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque (1986), Ludwig has curated numerous art exhibitions and exhibited his own photographs worldwide.

The Ludwig Collection consists of many hundreds of photographs of New England and English gravemarkers organized either by the deceased’s name or by the town, as well as copies of all photos used in Graven Images. Also included in the collection is a copy of Ludwig’s dissertation on gravestone iconography and offprints of several of his articles.

A freelance researcher and writer from Hawaii, Nanette Napoleon founded The Cemetery Research Project in 1985 to document graveyards and burials on the island of O‘ahu. She has subsequently completed inventories for the islands of Maui and Moloka‘i, documenting over 300 graveyards and more than 30,000 tombstone inscriptions.

The Napoleon collections consists of an array of articles on cemeteries and the culture of death from popular media assembled by Nanette Napoleon. One folder contains information on the Cemetery Research Project and cemeteries in Hawaii.

Carol A. Perkins was born April 25, 1926 in Rochester, N.Y., where she attended Madison High School. Her father, Vernon Perkins, was a World War I Army Air Service photographer in France, and she became interested in photography through his photograph albums. She graduated from a correspondence program at the New York Institute of Photography and graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Art in 1950. After matriculating from the Rochester General Hospital School of Medical Photography, she was employed at the Toledo Hospital Institute of Medical Research for twenty-two years, and then by the Medical College of Ohio for eleven years. While searching through New England graveyards for her Perkins ancestors, she became interested in gravestone studies and became a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies.

The Carol Perkins Collection consists of 1.5 linear feet of material, primarily color photographs of grave markers in Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Box 1 has two indices: one alphabetical by deceased’s surnames, and the other alphabetical by state, then town, then cemetery. Box 2 photographs include transcriptions of the deceased’s names, dates of birth/death, and inscriptions, and are organized by state, then town. The collection includes one folder of genealogical material and 20 black & white photographs of markers in England. Photographs taken at AGS conferences include some AGS members and were taken in the following years: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, and 2003.

Three months after it was incorporated by the state of Maine in March 1836, the Portland Granite Company acquired 17 acres of land from Seth Clark in Westbrook, Me., and began its quarrying operation. With 160 shares of common stock, the company’s members elected a board of three directors (Henry Iseley, M.P. Sawyer, and George Clark), with Henry R. Stickney serving as Treasurer and Secretary. Though not particularly prominent, the firm appears to have operated for at least fifty years, and is listed in directories of state industries through about the time of Stickney’s death in 1887.

Recorded on a slender seven pages in an otherwise blank bound ledger, the records of the Portland Granite Company provide slight but critical documentation of the organization of a significant quarrying operation. Included are the formal act of incorporation for the company, a record of approval by the corporation to accept their charter; notes on the election of officers; company by-laws; approval for the distribution of stock (160 shares); and an agreement with Seth Clark to purchase 17 acres in Westbrook, Me., for the operation.

A folklorist at Indiana University Kokomo for many years, Susanne S. Ridlen is noted for her research on grave markers in the Midwest. Her dissertation at Indiana University was on tombstones carved to mimic tree-stumps, a rustic form of funerary monument that enjoyed a vogue during the late nineteenth century. Ridlen’s research culminated in publication of her book Tree-Stump Tombstones: A Field Guide to Rustic Funerary Art in Indiana (Kokomo, 1999).

The Ridlen collection provides an extensive visual record of tree-stump tombstones in Indiana. Organized by county, town, and cemetery, the collection typically includes several views of each marker along with documentation of the individual(s) interred, the date of creation, inscriptions, and any other design motifs employed. These images and data form the basis for Ridlen’s Tree-Stump Tombstones.

A long-time member of the English Department at the University of Albany, Barbara Rotundo was a 1942 graduate in economics at Mount Holyoke College. After the death of her husband, Joseph in 1953, Rotundo became one of the first female faculty members at Union College, and after earning a master’s degree in English at Cornell University and a doctorate in American Literature from Syracuse University, she served as an associate professor of English at the University of Albany, where she founded one of the first university writing programs in the United States. Avocationally, she was a stalwart member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, helping to broaden its scope beyond its the Colonial period to include the Victorian era. Her research included the rural cemetery movement, Mount Auburn Cemetery, white bronze (zinc) markers, and ethnic folk gravestones. Her research in these fields was presented on dozens of occasions to annual meetings of AGS, the American Culture Association, and The Pioneer America Society. In 1989, after residing in Schenectady for forty-six years, she retired to Belmont, NH, where she died in December 2004.

Consisting primarily of thousands of color slides (most digitized) and related research notebooks, the Rotundo collection is a major visual record of Victorian grave markers in the United States. The notebooks and slides are arranged by state, with an emphasis on the eastern states, and white bronze (zinc) markers also are represented in photographs and a separate research notebook. The collection also includes several rare or privately published books.

A local historian and photographer from Dorchester, Mass., and an official in the Dorchester Historical Society, Robert Bayard Severy was born on October 11, 1944, at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Roxbury, Massachusetts. After high school Severy attended Suffolk University and received a certificate from the Franklin Institute in Photography in 1967. For over 32 years, he was employed in the Human Resources Division of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, pursuing his interests in photography throughout and documented the changing streetscapes of Boston and nearby towns. Since the early 1980s, Severy has documented gravestones in New England cemeteries.
The Severy Collection includes nearly 2,000 black and white prints (with some color) of gravestones in cemeteries in Massachusetts and Vermont. The collection is arranged by town and cemetery, and includes particularly good documentation of gravestones in Barnstable, Boston (Old Granary, King’s Chapel, Copps Hill), Brimfield, Dorchester (Cedar Grove, Dorchester North), Manomet (Manomet), Newbury (1st Parish), Norwell (First Parish), Quincy (Hancock), Watertown (Mt. Auburn), and Weymouth (Old North, Mt. Hope, Fairmount) in Massachusetts; and Bennington and Wilmington, Vermont. Larger collections of Severy’s work can be found in many other institutions, including Historic New England, The Bostonian Society, The Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, and several local public libraries and historical societies.

Long-time residents of Berkeley, California, Thomas W. Tenney and his wife Margaret took up photography in a serious way in the early 1960s. Photographing the Bay Area scene and publishing in the New York Times and elsewhere, Thomas Tenney became a full-time photographer by about 1960. His photographic interests ranged from urban landscapes and advertising signs to the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Margaret Tenney, also a photographer, was a visual artist who worked in collage and monoprint. For over a decade, the couple took summer trips to New England to photograph colonial and early national gravestones, culminating in a public exhibition of their work in 1972 at the Bolles Gallery in San Francisco.

A vast array of the Tenneys’ photography, artwork, and collection of historic photographs, including thousands of photographs and negatives ranging from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s.