Archival Treasures of Green-Wood Cemetery to Be Unearthed, Digitized and Made Public

Brooklyn’s most famous cemetery is poised to bring its unique archival collection into the digital age. Green-Wood Cemetery just received a $40,000 grant enabling the 177-year-old institution to craft a plan for digitizing millions of its historic photographs, records and artworks over the next year, with aim of making many of these items publicly available for the first time.

The initiative, called “Gone But Not Forgotten: Digitizing the 177-Year-Old Legacy of New York City’s Green-Wood Cemetery,” is one of 248 projects recently funded by the the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jut to be clear, Green-Wood’s money won’t be spent on scanning and uploading anything just yet. Rather, the funding will allow the cemetery’s staff to assemble a dream team of experts who can take a comprehensive view of the archive and make a plan that will best serve the collection, interested scholars and the public.

“To our knowledge, this will be the largest collection of cemetery records in the United States ever to be digitized and made available to the public,” Lisa Alpert, Director of Development and Marketing at Green-Wood, told to Gothamist.

What kinds of items can you expect to appear from Green-Wood’s treasure trove of a collection? How about:

• Documentation of the cemetery’s founding, including original documents relating to the acquisition of cemetery property from prominent Brooklynites including the Bennett, Bergen, Wyckoff and Schermerhorn families; title searches; deeds; and maps of Green-Wood’s subsequent land acquisitions
• Large-scale handwritten chronological burial books dating back to 1840, containing meticulously and beautifully recorded data, including cause of death, age at death, nativity and occupation. These records present an extraordinary resource to the field of public health history.
• Architectural drawings and blueprints of Green-Wood’s mausoleums and other architecture
• More than 10,000 archival photographs documenting distinct changes to the condition of individual monuments over time
• Almost 200 oil paintings by notable artists who are interred at Green-Wood
• An array of artifacts relating to Green-Wood’s permanent residents including a Whip car from a William F. Mangels (1866-1958) amusement park ride; Art Deco-style radios by the famed industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague (1883-1960); a Tiffany-engraved invitation to Albert Bailey for the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883; and more

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