Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Modern Vision for an Historic Cemetery | Page 8

Online Memorial
Pages
By Bree D. Harvey, Vice President of Cemetery & Visitor Services
Mount Auburn’s “community of the dead” now
totals more than 100,000 people. Among those buried
here are men and women who have shaped our local,
regional, and national identity: activists, authors, designers,
inventors, scientists, and philosophers. Also buried here,
in even greater numbers, are those important in our own
lives: mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters
and sons, mentors and friends. With a new feature on
our website, Mount Auburn has enhanced its mission to
commemorate the dead using an online tool that celebrates
the lives and preserves the memories of those buried at the
Cemetery.
Mount Auburn’s new Online Memorial Pages collect
the stories of those buried here, as shared by the family and
friends who knew them best. With this program, a unique
memorial page for each person buried at the Cemetery
can now be accessed through the burial search feature on
our website. Designed to be collaborative and interac-
tive, each memorial page is meant to become a dedicated
online space where family and friends can work together
to celebrate the lives of their loved ones, using text, pho-
tographs, news clippings, and videos to tell the story of a
person’s life. Over time, these memorial pages will become
dynamic timelines charting the academic accomplishments,
military service, career highlights, family milestones, and
important life events that help to define the person being
remembered.
Linked to our mobile app, these memorial pages will
allow visitors “in the field” to learn more about the lives
of those now buried at the Cemetery. And for those unable
to make an actual visit to the Cemetery, the online memo-
rial pages become a virtual place to visit, to reflect, and to
remember.
Many who are buried at Mount Auburn lived rich lives,
and every individual has left behind fascinating stories that
are worthy of preservation. We hope that you will use this
new online tool to celebrate the lives of your own loved ones.
Interested to learn more about our new
Memorial Pages?
Visit www.mountauburn.org/
OnlineMemorialPages for a brief tour and
tutorial of this new online feature.
6 | Sweet Auburn
To launch the new Memorial Pages, the Friends has
begun to populate the pages for some of its most
notable residents. Photographs, documents, and
other digital “artifacts” that help to tell their stories
can now be accessed on their individual pages.
Following are just few highlights from this project.
We hope these examples will inspire you to begin
adding information and stories to the memorial
pages for your own loved ones.
Activist and author Julia Ward
Howe (1819–1910) wrote the
lyrics for “Battle Hymn of the
Republic” in 1862, as the Civil
War gripped the country. A
contemporary audio recording
of the song, as performed by
the U.S. Army Band, celebrates
Howe’s iconic and enduring
patriotic melody.
Audio: Library of Congress.
Lawyer Clement Garnett
Morgan (1859-1929) fought
for civil rights on a local and
national scale. This 1905
photograph shows Morgan
(front row, center) with other
founding members of the
Niagara Movement, a civil
rights group considered to be
the precursor to the NAACP.
Image: Library of Congress.