Gravestone cleaning can turn back the wheels of time to make your ancestor’s final resting place nearly as beautiful as the day their family members gathered there to wish them farewell.

Time has been hard on gravestones that were originally considered nearly permanent. Weathering, erosion, neglect, and vandalism have all taken their toll.

While some of this damage cannot be reversed, in other cases, preservation and prevention can make all the difference. And as more people become interested in genealogical research, there is a greater desire to preserve what is left of our ancestor’s legacies in stone.

By cleaning and caring for historic resting places you can provide an opportunity for future generations to glimpse the past. Then burial grounds will become treasures of information that would otherwise have been forgotten or lost.

Comment by Dick Eastman:

I believe that every genealogist should be familiar with the information in this article, whether or not that person ever intends to do the cleaning himself/herself.

You can learn a lot from the article written by Cathy Wallace and published in the BillionGraves web site at: https://blog.billiongraves.com/gravestone-cleaning-101/. Topics in that article include:

• Why Should You Clean a Gravestone?
• When Should You NOT Clean a Gravestone?
• Sources of Gravestone Damage
• Understand Laws and Regulations
• Headstone Cleaning Tips
• Methods for Gravestone Cleaning