Earlier this afternoon, my wife and I were at Albany Rural Cemetery and we created a short video on how to clean a gravestone. We went to a relative's lot and chose a stone within it and I began to clean the stone and also described why and how to clean it while Michele filmed the demo. The video will be at the end of this blog entry.
I must mention that I am not a professional gravestone conservator; simply a genealogist and descendant from my ancestors who is caring for his ancestors and relatives gravesites as best as he can. I have cleaned numerous gravestones of my relatives and have uprighted and leveled half-dozen others.
I admit that some stones have cleaned up better than others. But whether one gravestone comes out better than the next; they all are in much better condition that before I started.
A picture of the gravestone pre-cleaning is below.
A picture of the gravestone post-cleaning is below.
In two weeks, I will come back to this plot to check whether the gravestone has brightened. The lichens that were growing on the stone were removed and the stone is obviously cleaner than before. Time will tell how it comes out.
Below are two photos where the outcome was great with only one cleaning application.
The original video was shot in HD and was crystal clear but unfortunately the video had to be compressed in order to be uploaded on this blog. Video quality and clarity were lost.
Outstanding demo!
ReplyDeleteWill look forward to the end result in a couple weeks.
Been working on some older stones myself and the D2 does a nice job.
However, you brought out a couple of keys steps (like cooling the stone down with water), that not only makes sense...it helps the process.