On Wednesday 12, the Jefferson County Historical Commission and the Texas Historical Commission will hold a Cemetery Preservation Workshop and African American History Harvest. The event is free to the public, but you must sign up at the following link:

The info and schedule is as follows:

Cemetery Preservation Workshop and African American History Harvest

Join the Jefferson County Historical Commission in downtown Beaumont for a daylong learning event and history harvest, where the public is invited to bring their family photos, letters, and other precious items of family history. Staff at the Tyrrell Historical Library will be on-site to help scan this material and provide families with free digital copies of it for their archives. Example items for the African American history harvest include the following:

• Early family photographs
• Funeral programs and newspaper obituaries
• Church anniversary booklets/programs
• Yearbooks and photos of all-Black schools
• Old maps and deeds regarding freedom colonies

Members of the Texas Historical Commission’s Cemetery Preservation Program will be on-site presenting on best practices of cemetery preservation and hosting an interactive cemetery mapping station for Jefferson County and the surrounding communities. Help us map the location of missing historic African American cemeteries for the Texas Historic Sites Atlas! We’ll end the afternoon with a special tour of Pear Orchard Cemetery, one of South Beaumont’s historic African American cemeteries that was recently designated a Historic Texas Cemetery. Contact the Jefferson County Historical Commission to RSVP or sign up via Eventbrite.

10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.: presentation by the Texas Historical Commission Cemetery Division

12:00–1:00 p.m.: break for dutch treat lunch in downtown restaurants

1:00–3:00 p.m.: history harvest, cemetery mapping, or scanning documents and photos

3:30–5:00 p.m.: visit to Pear Orchard Cemetery for on-site presentation

I guess you could say that this is also part of the Cemetery Inventory Project I discussed last year. If you have information on a local cemetery, the Texas Historical Commission wants to put it in their database. Also, the commission will not be making a practical presentation on how to fix headstones. That may be scheduled for later in the year. Stay tuned!

Overall, this is a good educational experience for someone who would like to know the what, where, and how of cemetery preservation and historical research. It is also a good starting point for those wishing to learn how cultures differ when it comes to cemetery etiquette. Watching a couple of YouTube videos and reading a blog post or two doesn’t make you an authority on how to clean and rearrange things in a cemetery. You need to respect those who came before you; they have a process to do things.

I hope to see you at the event. If you have any questions about this workshop or cemeteries in general, you can contact me at rediscoveringsetx@gmail.com.