Preserving History, and Uncovering Secrets, at Green-Wood Cemetery

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Volunteers spend one day a month trolling through the many files at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn as part of a project to preserve documents and create a searchable database.

Until they put on their cotton gloves, they are a tango dancer, a former labor-management specialist with the Internal Revenue Service, a retired grade-school teacher, a graduate student. Then they become history detectives, but without the cameras from a certain PBS program.

They â€" and 15 to 20 other volunteers â€" gather one Saturday a month to pan for historical gold in the massive files of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, files that contain thousands of faded, yellowing letters, telegrams, sketches and blueprints. The records go back 175 years, to Green-Wood’s founding as a rural cemetery.

The volunteers dream of discovering evidence that will unravel some of Green-Wood’s mysteries, as they did in 2010, when they came across two small handwritten cards that explained the demise of a statue atop the tomb of the 19th century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The cards said the statue had been vandalized in 1959 â€" not that long ago in historical terms. But the incident had been forgotten, leaving Gottschalk’s fans puzzled.

After four years of sorting through the cemetery’s archives, the volunteers are accustomed to deciphering fancy handwriting and decoding orotund sentences. A note from an executor instructing the cemetery to prepare a certain plot for the burial of a widow next to her late husband can seem as involved as a paragraph from Henry James or Edith Wharton.

They are also accustomed to seeing the flourishes of old signatures, perhaps not as elaborate as John Hancock’s, but still notable. They have amassed a collection of signatures of early baseball pioneers interred at Green-Wood, including James F. Wenman, a founder of the Cotton Exchange and the shortstop of the Knickerbocker Club’s baseball team, the first in the city. Another signature they have discovered and preserved was that of DeWitt Hopper, the actor famous for reciting the poem “Casey at the Bat.”

Anthony M. Cucchiara, the amateur boxer who is Green-Wood’s archivist, said the volunteers’ main goal was to “stabilize paper material by opening and placing it in acid-free folders.” They have been instructed to remove “damaging metal clips and rubber bands,” he said.

“It’s tremendously labor intensive,” he said, adding that the volunteers had gone through about a third of the cemetery’s burial orders. Green-Wood expects to complete the first phase of its archive project later in the year with the creation of a searchable bibliographic database.

If the archive project provides a look at the day-to-day business of running a cemetery, it also provides look at a particular slice of New York history. Sara Fetherolf, a volunteer who has a minor in archival studies from Brooklyn College, said it was “ordinary-people history, not who-was-mayor history.”

“You find yourself constructing stories in your mind,” she said. “You piece together a whole story of a family. You get a little of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ from it â€" who died young, who lived to be 85.”

The tango dancer in the group, Jeff Blustein, is also a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and an expert in medical ethics. He said he volunteered for the Green-Wood project because he recognized the importance of preserving memory. “I was looking for a way to put that interest into practice,” he said.

He called the archive project “daunting.”

“The vast majority of it is of no historic interest, but it gives a picture of the time. And if we find something important, something from some important figure, we all jump up and say, “Wow, this is great.’ It doesn’t happen that often that you find something like that attached to Louis Comfort Tiffany or the Roosevelts or the Schermerhorns.”

He opened a folder. The first document inside was a telegram from 1953 ordering a family’s grave reopened for the burial of a woman whose husband had been buried there 19 years before. Their names did not ring any bells.

“I personally haven’t found anybody famous,” he said. “I still am hopeful.”