AMESBURY, Mass. — An Amesbury woman spends her days among the dead so that family members will know where their loved ones are buried.
Cemetery Commission member Jane Snow has spent years documenting every grave and is now working on restoring the city's most historic cemetery.
"The cemetery does hold a tremendous amount of information. And it is the very fabric of this town," said Snow. "And lo and behold under these rhododendron bushes were these five gravestones that had just become overgrown."
Snow is a retired teacher who found a new calling; the meticulous documentation of those buried in Amesbury cemeteries.
She began the project shortly after the death of her father, who was a veteran.
"I ended up getting the data off of every veteran's stone I could find. I photographed them all and I made my first book in memory of my dad," said Snow.
The book contained more than 500 entries, but why stop there? Snow eventually documented every grave in that cemetery - 6,000 - some without stones, some the resting place of children no one knew were dead.
But she didn't stop there. She did the same thing at a second cemetery nearby.
"Yeah. I'm a detail-orientated person," said Snow.
The details, hand-sketched, hand-scribbled, annotations of ancient names and plots, are puzzle pieces to a story that somebody somewhere, Snow says, is important.
"Is that really my great uncle? Or is that really my great-great aunt? For some people that means a lot," said Snow.
And now, Snow is on the final frontier, Union Cemetery, where under sometimes crumbling stones, revolutionary war veterans rest.
Thanks to Snow, one of them, David Lowell, has a fresh marker.
"By being able to research the data and going through the Veteran's Administration we were able to put his stone back," said Snow.
Snow says there are about 70 stones in the cemetery that are in disrepair - either fallen over or broken. Most are from before World War I.
Snow estimates it will take about $15- to $20,000 to get all of them repaired.
A local business recently awarded a grant to the effort, but Snow says they can use even more help.