Providing Comfort and Inspiration: Transcribing the Records of America’s First Rural Cemetery

FAIN: PB-275324-20

Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery (Cambridge, MA 02138-5517)
Meg Winslow (Project Director: May 2020 to October 2022)

Four staff members, three consultants, and transcription software in order to transcribe handwritten nineteenth-century documents from Mount Auburn’s early decades. Once edited, completed transcriptions will be uploaded and linked to the online collections database with accompanying catalog information.

The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery respectfully requests a grant to keep staff and consultant positions in the Historical Collections & Archives Department as they work from home on a new initiative to transcribe and make accessible digitized 19th-century documents. With over 3,500 linear feet of holdings, our archive is a specialized repository of materials not found anywhere else in the world. Although much of our collection is available online, many of the documents are handwritten, difficult to read, and inaccessible for many users. Using software on the crowdsourcing platform FromThePage.com, our Curator and professional consultants will engage a team of volunteers and the public in transcribing these materials. By linking the completed transcriptions to our online database, we can ensure that researchers and the public will have direct access to the content in these documents, unlocking access to a wealth of information on the rural cemetery movement in American history.