The annual meeting of the Friends of the Southport Historical Society will be held on Monday, June 16 at the Southport Town Hall at 7:30 p.m. It will be a fun-filled and informative event, featuring a potpourri of historical videos presented by Larry Crane and the “Final Chapter” of the story of Southport’s “Cemetery Ladies.”

Becky Weeks Singer and Lois Rand Weeks will introduce their project cataloging and photographing every grave on Southport Island, and making it available to the general public.

Becky Weeks Singer of Southport and Lois Rand Weeks of Hampden are the “Cemetery Ladies,” a moniker given them by a Newagen resident who spotted them cleaning the gravestones in the small cemetery near the Town Dock at Newagen. Becky grew up in Massachusetts, but has been coming to Southport nearly her whole life.

In 1960, her parents bought the house she lives in on Route 238, and after they passed away, she and her husband Jim acquired it, retiring there full time in 2008. She is an elected member of the Southport Cemetery committee. Lois Rand Weeks, who is married to Becky’s brother, Charlie, grew up on Southport and graduated from BRHS. Her family roots trace to the 1600s on the island.

Both women are, and have been, very interested in family genealogy, and have spent hundreds of hours doing research. Important sources for accurate historical information are gravestones found in cemeteries. They learned early on how difficult it is to access that information, particularly when researching “from afar.”

In 2007, while discussing cemeteries at a meeting in Connecticut, they concluded that they could help other genealogists and researchers by creating a database of all the cemeteries and gravestones in the town of Southport.

Their initial thoughts were to photograph all the gravestones on Southport, and find some avenue or portal to put them on the Internet. Should be a simple, quick project, right? Just go to each cemetery, take the pictures, record the information, and upload it. It should only take a few months!

Work began in 2008 at the Old Burying Ground Cemetery by the fire station. Three things became quickly apparent: First, the majority of stones needed to be cleaned before the inscriptions could even be read, much less photographed; second, reading and deciphering them was going to be a real challenge because of deterioration over the centuries; and finally, this project was going to take years.

There are eight “full size” cemeteries on Southport, a number of private plots, and about 900 gravestones with 1,322 individuals who have now been cataloged.

Becky and Lois enlisted their husbands to assist in phase one, cataloging the cemeteries. While Becky cleaned each stone, Charlie assisted by wetting and washing each stone with a hose (he used to be a volunteer fireman-well qualified for the task).

Lois painstakingly recorded the information and plot locations, and Jim did the photography. As with every project, “life” got in the way with other priorities and phase one was finally wrapped up in 2013.

Phase two evolved into two separate projects. The first, managed by Lois, involved creating a series of books for each cemetery. Every stone in the nine books has its own page, with plot location, all legible information off the stone, and a photograph. Lois and Charlie finally completed this intensive time-consuming project this year, and have donated them to the Southport Historical Society. They will be accessible to the public at the Museum on Hendricks Hill Road on Southport.

Becky’s assignment was to locate the best way to make this information available online, and she found the ideal platform — www.findagrave.com. It is, in their opinion, the most comprehensive “gravesite” web location available, and is very reader friendly. (It has recently been acquired by Ancestry.com, which will give it even wider exposure and use).

She then, with help from Jim, manually uploaded all the information contained in the books-one grave at a time- into the www.findagrave.com database along with the photos. It was helpful that other folks had already entered a good deal of information on Southport graves, and they were able to enhance the work that had already been done.

This resource will be invaluable for genealogical researchers and others to locate information regarding individuals buried on Southport. Becky completed this phase in April of 2014.

Visiting cemeteries and reading inscriptions on gravestones might seem to be a boring and mundane task, but nothing could be farther from the truth. They tell stories of lives well lived, of veterans and the wars they fought, of families tragically wiped out by disease and of Southporters lost at sea.

If you want to know about someone buried on Southport, check out www.findagrave.com or visit the Southport Historical Society Museum. The work of the “Cemetery Ladies” is available to all.

The annual meeting is open to the general public, not just Historical Society members. We hope you will come and enjoy the evening with us.