A Cemetery Story
New documentary-style series explores the lives behind Laurel’s historic headstones, piecing together forgotten stories, one historical record at a time.
There’s something intriguing about an old headstone whose inscription has nearly disappeared beneath decades of dirt and botanical growth. You can usually make out a name, perhaps a year, but little else. Who was this person? What did they do? Where did they live? Who did they love? And what circumstances eventually brought them to this particular cemetery?
Sometimes, though, it isn’t the condition of the stone that catches my attention. It’s what the stone says.
A death at an unusually young age. A husband and wife who died within months of each other. Several children in the same family who never reached adulthood. Dates clustered so closely together that they suggest there must be a story behind them.
That curiosity is at the heart of “A Cemetery Story,” a new video series I recently started for The Laurel History Boys that combines two of my longtime interests: Laurel history and archival research.
The idea came from a friend I worked with many years ago at the Laurel Library, Leslie Johnson. She sent me an Instagram video featuring a woman who cleans and preserves old headstones while her followers research the people buried beneath them. Leslie thought I might enjoy doing something similar with a Laurel spin, focusing less on the headstone cleaning aspect and more on the hidden stories behind them.
And, of course, she was right. Within days of starting on the first episode, I was hooked.
Finding the Story
The subjects aren’t necessarily chosen because they have the oldest, most ornate, or most neglected headstones. I’m simply looking for anything that catches my eye.
Sometimes all it takes is noticing that someone died unusually young. The natural question is, what happened?
That’s usually where an episode begins. The headstone provides the first clue, and from there I turn to the historical record.
Census records reveal households and family relationships. Marriage records introduce spouses. Deeds and city directories tell us where people lived, what property they owned, and how they earned a living. Death certificates may explain how they died. And old newspapers can uncover remarkable details that no other record mentions.
One document leads to another, and gradually the name on the stone becomes a relatable person.
As the research unfolds in each video, viewers also see the headstone being gently cleaned with water, D/2 Biological Solution, and soft-bristle brushes. Years of discoloration gradually disappear, and inscriptions become clearer.
There’s something particularly satisfying about those two processes happening together—as the stone slowly becomes visible again, so does the life behind it.
The Arterburn Family
The first episode demonstrated particularly well how a few dates on a group of headstones can open the door to a much larger story.
What caught my attention about the Arterburn family was the number of family members who died young and within a relatively short period of one another. Before knowing anything else about them, the stones themselves posed an obvious question—what happened to this family?
The answer, I discovered, was tuberculosis.
Over a span of just 14 years, from 1909 to 1923, four members of this family buried together had died young. Research eventually established that each had succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis, including Ellnetta Arterburn, whose New Jersey death certificate I obtained only after the episode was completed.
At the time, tuberculosis—often called “consumption”—had been one of America’s most feared diseases. It could linger for months or years, and when it entered a household, multiple family members could eventually become sick.
Suddenly, the dates carved into those stones weren’t simply a collection of unrelated deaths. They documented a family repeatedly devastated by the same disease.
But the records revealed another remarkable chapter.
After losing her husband, the widowed Mrs. Arterburn also lost the family home to foreclosure. Yet somehow, despite everything she had endured, she managed to buy it back.
That’s the kind of thing a headstone could never tell you.
What initially appeared to be a tragic collection of dates became a story not only of illness and loss, but also of financial hardship, resilience, and one widow’s determination to reclaim her family’s home.
Roy Barnes: The Night Manager
The second episode began just steps away from the Arterburns at Ivy Hill Cemetery.
Roy Franklin Barnes was born in 1897 and died in 1932, at just 35 years old. Research into his short life eventually took the story beyond Laurel and into Depression-era Washington, DC.
Barnes worked nights for Western Union at its office in the Commercial National Bank Building at 14th and G Streets, NW. Newspaper research uncovered a remarkable incident there in May 1931.
A robber entered the office and ordered Barnes to open the safe.
Barnes refused.
According to newspaper accounts, he essentially told the robber to “open it yourself.”
The robbery failed.
Less than a year later, Barnes was dead.
On April 10, 1932, his body was discovered in Washington’s Tidal Basin. His death certificate listed drowning, with corrosive poisoning and asphyxia also contributing to his death, which was ruled a suicide.
The research also led to his parents, his wife Audrey, and their son, De Forrest. The family story became even sadder when I discovered that De Forrest died just three years after his father, at only 17 years old.
What began with a simple question about a 35-year-old man buried at Ivy Hill became a story involving a nighttime Western Union office, an attempted robbery, a mysterious and tragic death in Washington, and a family that endured another devastating loss only a few years later.
It was precisely the kind of unexpected journey I had hoped this series would uncover.
AI was used to create a clearer, more modern photograph of Roy Barnes from a photograph of him that appeared in the Washington Daily News the year before he died.
Gentle cleaning with D/2 biological solution and soft bristle brushes has helped to restore Barnes' headstone.
A Cemetery Short Story
Not every discovery, however, requires a full-length episode.
Sometimes a single event, newspaper clipping, or personal connection is worth preserving without attempting to reconstruct an entire life.
That led to a companion series: “A Cemetery Short Story.”
These videos will generally run less than five minutes, using the same combination of cemetery visits, historical records, photographs, and gentle headstone cleaning, but focusing on just a few notable events.
The first subject is someone who actually wasn’t a stranger to me at all.
Paul Warner was the grandfather of my childhood best friends, twins Rodney and Ronald Pressley. I knew him simply as their “Pop-Pop”—a familiar figure who was more like a father to the boys.
But Paul also had deep roots in Laurel.
He spent his entire life here and grew up on Avondale Street, practically in the shadow of the old Avondale Mill. His story offers a glimpse of a Laurel that existed before many of us knew it.
One incident even put him on the front page of the Laurel Leader.
In 1969, Paul was working at Keller’s Newsstand when he became involved in a robbery there. Decades later, that newspaper account offers a glimpse into a part of his life I had never known.
That makes this first Short Story different from the episodes about the Arterburns and Roy Barnes.
With them, the records introduced me to people who had been gone long before I encountered their headstones.
With Paul, the process works in reverse.
I already knew the person. Now the records allowed me to discover parts of his life I hadn’t known.
I suspect there are many more Laurel stories like his—people remembered by family, neighbors, and friends whose experiences may never warrant a book or lengthy documentary, but certainly deserve a few minutes.
When Research Becomes Personal
Something unexpected has happened while making these videos. The people I’m researching have begun to feel strangely familiar.
When you spend hours searching records for someone, you learn the names of their parents and siblings. You discover their marriages, where they lived, and what they did for a living. You follow their children into adulthood and encounter their illnesses, financial troubles, and family tragedies.
Eventually, you’re no longer just researching “Roy Franklin Barnes, 1897–1932.” You’re looking for Roy.
And you’re no longer simply trying to determine why several Arterburns died so young. You find yourself hoping the widow somehow managed to reclaim her home from foreclosure, and feeling genuinely relieved when a document reveals that she did manage to enjoy that measure of success in spite of everything else.
There’s an odd intimacy to reconstructing a life this way. These strangers have been gone for decades, yet they become people you genuinely care about.
Paul Warner adds another dimension. He reminds me that Laurel’s cemeteries aren’t populated exclusively by people from some distant, almost abstract past. They’re also resting places for people we knew, whose voices we remember, and whose lives overlapped with our own.
An Archive in Stone
Historic cemeteries are archives in their own right.
Walk through Ivy Hill and you’re surrounded by hundreds of individual entry points into the city’s past. Every stone represents a connection to a household, a workplace, a neighborhood, a family, and a particular moment in Laurel’s history.
Most of those stories will never be told in books. Many of the names have disappeared from living memory. But the records are often still there to be found.
I already have several possible subjects for future installments of both series, and I’m discovering that researching one person frequently leads to another. A sibling, neighbor, employer, or witness mentioned in one record can unexpectedly point toward an entirely different story—often in the very same cemetery.
I’ve also noticed that my cemetery research visits are taking a little longer these days. I’m not complaining. I find that I now feel an obligation to stop by and check on the graves of the people I’ve “met” through this project, much as I would visit a member of my own family.
Richard Friend is a founding member of The Laurel History Boys, and creator of LostLaurel.com.
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