Preservation Society of Chapel Hill working to map unmarked graves

Local preservation groups want to make sure black Chapel Hill residents from long ago receive in death the honor they were denied in life.

The Cemeteries Advisory Board and the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill are working to identify unmarked graves in Chapel Hill’s cemeteries using ground-penetrating radar mapping technology.

Ernest Dollar, preservation director, said the Preservation Society first used radar-detection technology on the African-American section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery in 2009.

“We began a project to map out a third of the cemetery to test our theories about there being more graves in this section,” he said. “Sure enough, we found about 60 unmarked graves in this one corner of the cemetery.”

Since then, the radar-detection technology has been used to map West Chapel Hill Cemetery and the Barbee-Hargraves Cemetery, both of which are traditionally African-American cemeteries.

“One of our purposes on the concentrating on African-American sections is that those graves have been subject to vandalism and bad record keeping,” Dollar said. “It’s sort of our way of giving back to them what they had taken in their lifetimes.”

The Preservation Society received grant money from the Kelly Webb Trust and Strowd Roses to complete the initial test in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.

After seeing the success of the project, the town agreed to fund the work done in Barbee-Hargraves and West Chapel Hill through the Cemeteries Advisory Board, Dollar said.

Steve Moore, chairman of the board, said he is proud to be working to document gravesites.

“The reality is that for every one of these burials, there are the families of these individuals,” Moore said. “It’s important that we do as much as we can to document these burials.”

Moore said the board plans to create a map of the cemeteries.

“We will document everything we find from the radar,” he said. “The plan is to make some of the hard data available in libraries as well as online.”

Moore said he hopes the map will give family members a way to locate loved ones.

“A lot of people who live out of town have family members who are repudiated to be in the cemetery, and this may given them the link to tie them in.”

Dollar also sees this as a way to honor the black history of Chapel Hill.

“So much of the black history in Chapel Hill has been unwritten, undocumented, undiscovered,” Dollar said.

“I hope this will give African-American residents comfort in knowing that people are interested in preserving these sites, honoring these people and recording their stories.”

Dollar said the Preservation Society is slated to complete the map of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery this spring.

“It’s a gamble at best, but if we can identify some of them, I think it will be a project well worth working on.”

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