As the sun set over Concord on Tuesday evening, Jill McDaniel gave a small group of people a tour of an area she knew backwards and forwards: Old North Cemetery.
Ten years ago, McDaniel took over as Concord’s cemetery administrator – a job she never knew existed until a friend told her to apply.
“I thought I’d be bored,” she said. “But right away I realized that cemeteries aren’t just a place full of monuments. There’s a story behind every soul that was there – some short, some elaborate.”
McDaniel and her 12-person grounds crew – eight full-time employees and four summer temps – form a small segment of the Concord’s Parks and Recreation Department. The team mows the lawns, repairs monuments, digs graves and manages any and every part of the city’s 13 cemeteries.
“It’s a busy job,” McDaniel said. “There’s no downtime. Ever.”
In her spare time, McDaniel was instructed to start transferring the city’s paper records into a computer database. These records, she said, tell the stories of Concord residents dating back to the mid-1700s.
There’s Nancy, the slave who was emancipated during her teenage years but continued to live with the Herbert family for the remainder of her life. She was eventually buried on the family’s plot of land.
There’s a little section in Calvary Cemetery, where more than 100 unidentified infants were buried, McDaniel said. She and two volunteers have been looking at records from Waters Funeral Home, slowly gathering lost names and dates.
There’s the grave of former President Franklin Pierce, who is buried with his wife and children – not too far from Nancy – in Old North Cemetery.
Mandy Huot, author of Etched in Stone: The untold stories of the Merrimack Valley, said pages and pages could be written about every single cemetery in the area.
“My interest in cemeteries grew with the tradition of going to visit family members on Memorial Day,” Huot said. “I would just start wandering and wondering who these people were.”
So Huot made it her mission to find out more about the places she visited and names she saw — and wrote a book to share what she found with others.
“I figured, I’m interested in cemeteries. Maybe somebody else is too,” she added.
McDaniel said a number of people come to her searching for missing links in their family trees.
“I hear all the details, it’s so interesting” she said. “They have find out a little secret, and they share it with me.”
One area of the Blossom Hill Cemetery – which McDaniel calls the “Common Ground” – appears to be a burial ground for 686 men, women and children who were poor or without family, McDaniel said. Most of these graves are unmarked, but the crew found names in the funeral ledgers.
In response to this discovery, McDaniel decided to launch an “Adopt a Grave” program in 2011. For $100, an individual can pay for a grave marker to memorialize one of the former Concord residents.
“It’s so important to me. We may not know exactly where they are, but their names are recorded and we remember them,” she said. “They deserve that, at the very least.”
It can be a difficult job at times, McDaniel said.
“It takes a certain type of person to do what the staff does,” she said. “They’ve got to be strong, have compassion, be sympathetic and want to lend a hand to an elderly person or a grieving person at any time.”
Yet McDaniel said she wouldn’t want to work anywhere else.
“My crew is amazing,” she added. “We’re like a big family. I’m lucky to have them.”
(Katie Galioto can be reached at 369-3302, kgalioto@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @katiegalioto.)