Your first visit, step by step

Old leaning headstones in a grassy churchyard lit from the side by low sun, with a bank of hydrangeas on the right — Low sun across old churchyard stones

Visiting respectfully and legally

Hours are the law.

Most cemeteries close at dusk, and being inside after closing is trespassing. Night visits are only legal on an organized tour.

Private means ask first.

Church, family and abandoned burial grounds are often on private land. An unlocked gate is not permission. Find the owner, sexton or parish office and ask.

Funerals and mourners come first.

If a service is under way, leave that section, keep your voice down, and never photograph a burial or a grieving visitor.

Do not touch what you do not have to.

Never lean, sit or pull on a stone. Old markers can weigh several hundred pounds, rest on corroded pins, and have killed people by toppling.

No rubbings.

Many cemeteries ban gravestone rubbings and some states restrict them by law, because pressure and wax damage soft stone. A photograph in good light records more.

Nothing goes on the stone.

Shaving cream, chalk, flour, wire brushes, bleach and pressure washers all cause lasting harm. Use light and water only, and clean only with the owner's written permission.

Take nothing, leave nothing.

Fragments, flags, coins, stones left on markers and flowers all belong where they are. Removing anything from a grave is a crime.

Ask before you publish or fly.

Some cemeteries require a permit for tripods, commercial photography or drones. Skip photos of recent graves unless the family has asked for them.

The do-no-harm standard

Cemetery Conservators for United Standards Free do-no-harm standards for touching, cleaning and repairing stones

How to read a headstone

Material dates the stone.

Dark slate and brown sandstone are mostly before 1830, white marble (now gray and sugary) runs about 1830 to 1900, and polished granite takes over after that. Bluish-gray metal markers that ring when tapped are cast zinc from 1875 to 1915.

Symbols follow fashion.

Winged skulls give way to winged cherub faces in the 1700s, then to urns and willows around 1800, then to Victorian lambs, clasped hands, draped urns and broken columns.

Small carvings carry facts.

A lamb usually marks a child, a broken column or cut bud a life ended early, clasped hands a marriage or a farewell, and an anchor hope or a life at sea.

Emblems name memberships.

Square and compass, three linked chain rings, and tree-stump monuments point to fraternal orders, and a government-issue upright marble slab marks a veteran.

Old inscriptions have their own spelling.

A long s looks like an f, 'relict' means widow, 'consort' means a wife who died before her husband, and 'AE' or 'aetatis' introduces the age at death.

The plot tells the family story.

Read neighboring stones together. Shared surnames, a row of small markers from one winter, or a second wife beside the first say more than any single stone.

Rows of dark slate headstones with carved arched tops in an old burying ground, two visitors walking the path behind them — Carved slate stones in an old burying ground

A paved cemetery path running between tall evergreens on the right and iron-fenced family plots on the left

Directions you can take it

Five ways to spend the walk

Symbol and epitaph readingTreating each cemetery as a text, learning the visual language of carvers and tracking how beliefs about death changed over time.

Start here

Pick one row of pre-1900 stones and write down every symbol you see, then look each one up when you get home. Ten symbols is enough to start reading whole cemeteries.

Association for Gravestone Studies

Gravestone PhotographyMaking clear, well-lit records of stones and monuments, and artful pictures of statuary, ironwork and landscape.

Start here

Go in the first or last hour of sunlight, when low light rakes across the carving, and photograph five stones straight on with the full inscription in frame.

Volunteer grave documentingPhotographing and transcribing stones for free online databases so distant families and researchers can see them.

Start here

Open a free grave database, find an open photo request at a cemetery near you, and fulfill it. Your first upload helps a family that cannot make the trip.

Find a Grave

Garden cemeteries and toursVisiting the great landscaped cemeteries of the 1800s for their architecture, notable burials, arboretums and guided walks.

Start here

Find the nearest large Victorian-era garden cemetery and book its guided walking tour. Most run them on weekends from spring through fall for a small fee.

Stone CleaningGently removing lichen and grime from markers, with permission and training, as part of a preservation group.

Start here

Do not clean anything yet. Ask a local cemetery friends group or historical society when their next supervised cleaning day is, and learn the method there before you touch a stone.

Cemetery Conservators for United Standards

Open a card to see what to do first. Gravestone Photography and Stone Cleaning each end in a button that adds that direction's gear to the kit. The other three need nothing beyond the base kit.

Staying safe out there

Ticks, chiggers and poison ivy thrive in unmown sections. Wear long pants, use repellent, and check yourself afterward.
Watch your footing. Sunken graves, groundhog holes, hidden footstones and broken curbing turn ankles.
Stay out of mausoleums, vaults and receiving tombs, even open ones. Roofs and floors fail.
In a remote or rural cemetery, tell someone where you are going, since phone signal is often poor.
Carry water. Large cemeteries have long walks, little shade and no services.

A small rural cemetery of old stones and an iron fence on open grassland with snow-covered mountains behind, in black and white — A rural cemetery far from the nearest town

What trips beginners up

Expect many stones to be unreadable at noon. Flat overhead light erases shallow carving, so the same stone can be blank at midday and crisp at 5 p.m.
Expect symbols to have more than one meaning. A dove, a hand or a flower can vary by region, religion and decade, so treat a field guide as a starting point.
Do not try to see everything. Covering 50 acres in one visit teaches less than an hour spent on one old section.
Do not trust your memory. Photograph the cemetery sign and a wide view of each row first, or you will not know where your close-ups came from.
Do not 'help' by scrubbing or straightening a stone. Well-meant cleaning with the wrong brush or product is the most common damage volunteers cause.
Do not read dates as certain. Carvers made errors, stones were replaced decades later, and calendars changed in 1752.

Plain white marble slabs and obelisks on a mown hillside under a bright blue midday sky, their faces washed flat by overhead light — White marble under flat midday light

Where to learn more

Your best teacher is often local: many historic cemeteries have a friends group that runs walking tours, and county historical societies keep burial records and maps. Online, the gravestone studies society publishes free guides to symbols and carvers, and travel sites catalog unusual cemeteries worth a detour.

A Victorian headstone with a carved Gothic arch standing in tall grass beside a cemetery path, older stones behind it — A Gothic-arched Victorian headstone

Free places to learn the stones

Why the kit is this small

This hobby costs almost nothing because the cemetery supplies everything. The base kit exists to solve three problems: knowing what a symbol means, reading lettering that weather has nearly erased, and staying comfortable for a couple of hours in rough grass. The two add-on kits are for people who go further. The photography kit controls light on a stone, and the cleaning kit holds the only tools conservators consider safe, for use only where you have permission.

Rows of upright marble grave markers under live oaks hung with Spanish moss, with low sun coming through the trees

Pack the field bag

Every line, with its options side by side

Compare the options on each line, then set your tiers and check out from the cart. Clicking a card selects it there, and clicking the selected card again takes that line out. The field guide, flashlight, mirror, notebook, repellent and power bank start in the kit. The reflector and kneeling pad join when you switch on Gravestone Photography, and the brush, cleaner and sprayer with Stone Cleaning.

Plot 01

Cemetery symbolism field guide

Essential · Reference

Carved symbols are the vocabulary of an old cemetery. A guide you can flip through on site turns a row of puzzling carvings into readable stories.

budget

Understanding Cemetery Symbols: A Field Guide for Historic Graveyards (Messages from the Dead)

4.6(737)

$17.99

Cemetery Exploring

Your first visit, step by step

Visiting respectfully and legally

How to read a headstone

Directions you can take it

Staying safe out there

What trips beginners up

Where to learn more

Why the kit is this small

Pack the field bag

Cemetery symbolism field guide

Small LED flashlight

Shatterproof acrylic mirror

Weatherproof pocket notebook

Tick and insect repellent

Portable phone power bank

Collapsible photo light reflector

Foam kneeling pad

Soft-bristle scrub brush

Biological gravestone cleaner

Pump water sprayer