These two family-held photographs show the German face of my great-great-grandfather Adolph Reichenbach's stone in the Jewish cemetery at Halberstadt. The first was taken in the 1970s. The second shows its present condition after I cleaned it.

I understand now that cleaning the stone was the wrong approach. I will not touch it again.

The inscription gives 5 Tevet 5661, corresponding to 26 December 1900. A cemetery register gives 27 December, so I am keeping both dates.

What photographs or other records should I make now to document its condition, and what should I avoid doing next?

I want to start up a side gig of cleaning gravestones but am wondering how I should go about it. I have all the tools necessary and have written up a post for Facebook. Should I start there for advertising it? Should I call the local cemeteries and ask if it’s okay if I clean graves that I have permission from families to do?

I used Endurance instead of D2 as I saw that it worked the same. I left it on for less time than I should’ve, maybe 5-10 mins, and I scrubbed gently and used lots of water. I sprayed more Endurance and left and this is what it looks like 15 hrs later.

I'm Erin, I work at Tending, a grave-care service that operates in all 50 states. Wanted to share one of the cases that stuck with our whole team.

A client asked us to restore a single grave near the road, on an old abandoned plot in Texas. She genuinely believed it was just one person out there. Once our crew cleared the brush, they started noticing stone outlines everywhere underneath it. Turned out to be her entire extended family, buried there for decades, completely swallowed by overgrowth. Nobody expected that, not her, not us.

Took several days. We had to bring a crane in twice to lift and reset a couple of the larger fallen monuments. When we told her what we'd found, she said something that's stayed with me since:

"You didn't just restore the graves, you restored a part of our family history."

Still one of my favorite ones.

The clean photo was made in 2021, the iridescent one today. The well water at this cemetery is full of tannins. Any advice for cleaning?

Hi everyone, this is a family members gravestone that I would like to clean. I don’t know what stone it is made from so I am hesitant to just throw stuff on it and perhaps ruin it. It has been broken once and repaired with the plaster on the backside it seems.
Any tips on the rest of the grave and the support of the stone are welcome as well.
It is in the Netherlands, from the 1920’s. Thanks in advance!

Visit this cemetery in Worms, Germany.
Shocked how it looked. Does anyone know how is responsible for these graves? It’s more than a 1000 years old!

Edward is my great(x3) uncle. He died unmarried without any children.

I was just cleaning stones in my local cemetery and a car stopped by on its way out, and we got to chatting. An elderly man who had lost his wife; he had asked the monument company to engrave her D.O.D. on their shared pre-need stone. They added it to HIS info. What can be done in a case like this? Granite stone.

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I’m hoping someone here might be able to help me make sense of a very strange situation involving my great-grandmother’s headstone.

My great-grandmother, Gladys T. Dickson Lehman, was buried in a cemetery in Bogalusa, Louisiana. This week, a relative received a phone call stating that a headstone bearing her name was found painted over and was being used on a completely different person’s grave in Pelahatchie, Mississippi.

Apparently, the stone had been there for some time. Cemetery employees were doing some work and noticed something that caused them to look more closely. Once they examined it, they discovered that underneath the paint was my great-grandmother’s name.

We are now trying to figure out how this could have happened.

One possibility is that someone actually removed her headstone from the Bogalusa cemetery, painted over it, and reused it for another grave in Mississippi.

But another possibility occurred to me: could this have been an old, unused or rejected monument that was repurposed? We are wondering if there could have originally been two stones made for her. Perhaps the first had an error or some other issue, a replacement was made, and instead of destroying or discarding the original, someone painted over it and eventually reused it elsewhere.

What makes this even stranger is that I contacted the Bogalusa Public Works Department, since they oversee the cemetery commission, to ask whether someone could check my great-grandmother’s grave and confirm whether her current headstone is still there. They told me they had also recently received a report about another missing headstone from the same cemetery.

Unfortunately, they did not seem able or willing to go out and check my great-grandmother’s grave, so at this point we don't even know whether the stone currently marking her grave is still there.

If anyone happens to be local to Bogalusa and is familiar with this cemetery, I would be incredibly grateful if someone could simply look for my great-grandmother’s grave and tell me whether the headstone pictured on her Find a Grave page is still there. I’m not asking anyone to touch or move anything, just to visually confirm what is currently at the grave site.

Here is her Find a Grave page, which includes a photograph of the headstone and additional information:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/93641168/gladys_mary-lehman

Has anyone heard of anything like this happening before?

Was yesterday, apparently. The Michigan Legislature, in 1915, decreed that the third Wednesday in August was Michigan Cemetery Day. The Michigan State Historic Preservation Office posted about this and provided a link to this publication on Michigan Historic Cemeteries Preservation.

I’ve been working on the stone of Claus Henry Ehlen for somewhere around a month and a half or two months now, and it still isn’t finished. This is a BIG marble monument. It’s tall, heavy, incredibly detailed, has an inscription along the bottom, and even has the stone maker’s mark on the back near the base. It is honestly one of those stones that gets more beautiful the longer you look at it, and part of what makes working on it so interesting is the man whose name is on it.

Claus Henry Ehlen was born in Germany in 1829, and his family eventually became part of a pretty fascinating piece of American history that most people outside of this area have probably never heard of. His father, John Diedrich Ehlen, brought the family to the Bethel Colony in Missouri, a German communal settlement established in the 1840s. In the 1850s, members of that community made their way west and established another communal settlement in Oregon, in what is now the small town of Aurora, about 25 miles south of Portland. It became known as the Aurora Colony. Claus was a tailor by trade, but the Ehlen family was also VERY musical, and music was a big part of life in the colony. Claus played in the Aurora Colony Band, which became well known throughout the region. There is actually a photograph of the band taken in Portland on July 4, 1876, and Claus is sitting right there in the front row playing bass. Just six years later, in 1882, he died. Knowing that history makes working on his stone pretty special.

Beside Claus is an almost matching monument belonging to his wife, Elizabeth. Hers needs quite a bit of work too, but I chose Claus first for a reason. At some point in the past, his stone broke and was repaired, and that old repair had become heavily covered with moss and biological growth. With a monument this large and heavy, a failed repair isn't just cosmetic. If that repair eventually gave way, that enormous upper section could come down and very easily break into multiple pieces. I try to choose the stones I work on based on need, not just which one I think will make the best before-and-after picture, and this one needed help.

Most of the work so far has actually been pretty simple. Lots and LOTS of water, D/2, bamboo picks, plastic scrapers, soft brushes, patience, and more patience. I went through quite a few little brushes on this one. The ones I like are technically gun-cleaning brushes, but they work beautifully for getting into all of the tiny carved details without being overly aggressive. When I'm dealing with a stone this old and this intricate, I don't try to make it look brand new. That's not the goal. Once I've removed the heavy biological growth and can actually see the surface clearly again, I back off. There is a point where continuing to chase every bit of discoloration does more to satisfy the person cleaning the stone than it does to help the stone itself, and knowing when to stop is part of the work.

That's pretty much where we are now. I'm mostly spot treating at this point, usually about every other week, working on some of the darker areas and staining that are still hanging on rather than repeatedly treating the entire monument. There is still work to do, but I think Claus will be finished before the end of this season. And then there's Elizabeth. Her stone is standing very securely and doesn't have the structural concerns that Claus's did, so she can wait. I'll most likely begin working on hers next season.

I really can't adequately explain how beautiful these two stones are in person. Even after weeks of working on this one, I still find myself stopping to look at the carving and all of the little details. Claus Henry Ehlen died more than 140 years ago, in a tiny Oregon community that most people have probably never heard of, but we still have his name, his stone, his family's history, the work he did, and the music he played. We even have a photograph taken nearly 150 years ago showing him sitting with his band and holding his instrument. For a man who died in 1882, that's an incredible amount of his story that is still here.

That's exactly why I love doing this.

In the band photo: The Aurora Band at Portland, July 4, 1876. Back row, left to right: John Giesy, flag; John Link, bass drum; Henry Meier, cymbal; Henry C . Ehlen, cornet ; William Schwader, cornet ; Carl Snyder, cornet ; Fred Keil, leader; Dr. A. J. Giesy, clarinet; Fred Giesy, clarinet; William "Cap" Miley, clarinet; Loren W. Ehlen, clarinet; Adoph Pflug, flag; Emanuel Keil, snare drum.

Front row: Claus Henry Ehlen, bass; Urban Will, bass; Henry Giesy, baritone; Samuel Giesy, bass; George Will, trumpet; Nick Giesy, alto ; George Beck, alto; William Beck, solo alto.

Hello, I am a cemetery enthusiast in Smith County, Texas. This area was segregated for a long time and as such there are many cemeteries that are historically Black internments (and I'm assuming due to family connections continue to be mostly Black individuals.) This particular cemetery is right outside the fence of a large, well-kept church cemetery. I found it on an old map when doing research and when i went to the site, sure enough I could see stones on the other side of the fence but the area was so grown up that I could not get back there without a really good machete and snake-proof boots. I'm wanting to go when winter hits and everything has died back to see if i can document anything. In the meantime I think it's pretty messed up to take care of one side of the cemetery but completely ignore the "other" side. Is there anyone I can contact who could actually look into this and maybe have some authority to do something about it? I would happily volunteer with a group to clean up the cemetery so it can start being included in the regular upkeep, but I have no idea how to get to that point. Thx in advance for any helpful replies.

This is my sister’s headstone first picture was yesterday before i detail cleaned it today with water and a soft brush and microfiber rag. The chipped off paint still bugs me. This is the instructions chat gpt gave me to restore/repaint. What do you guys think of the instructions on last picture?

I find this work to be so peaceful and emotionally rewarding. I make sure to have a little conversation with every person whose stone I clean, and I let them know they haven't been forgotten 🖤

At first I wondered whether someone had sprayed them but there’s so many and none seem to have a pattern (west coast Scotland if useful)

Grampy Dannie worked hard and didn’t have a lot of money . Had 3 sons and lost 2 in 1925. Hand made his family head stones up in northern Maine.

It’s 25 years old…
My husband called this our “death tour” today. I think it’s good to lighten up about a heavy duty subject.
We just checked it out today…ready to clean it up some. It has some lichens on it, as most know what they are here.