I’m always happy to provide individually crafted tours for families and small groups. These can help to familiarize visitors with the basics of a town’s layout and history; they can also be engaging events for children as well as adults. … Continue reading Juxtapositions: Focused Family/Small-group Tours as Holiday Gifts

I. Links to the most recent guided tour handouts may be found at my Academia site, in the section on handouts. For those who’ve attended my tours (and those who haven’t), these include information about the carvers, the gravestones’ originals, … Continue reading Self-Guided Tour Handouts: I. The Old Cambridge Burying Ground Tour” (for Adults) and II. “Children’s Activities: Days, Months, Years and Ages” .

Stones for women in the Old Cambridge Burying Ground–and in many other colonial burial sites–tend to name them in terms of their husbands and fathers.(1) The honorific “Mrs.” usually appears (although this could refer to an older unmarried lady as … Continue reading Stones for Women and the Terms They Use

Often, as I’m seated on the red carpet that is Mistress Elizabeth’s open-air school on Saturday mornings, Continue reading The 11:30 Children’s Activity Hour

This is a topic that deserves more attention than it has received so far. I began work on this with another researcher, and we have been in hiatus over finishing it, but I want to point out the importance of … Continue reading Seventeenth Century Stones

Titles on gravestones tell us about the positions individuals held in social settings, including the colony’s ministerial, military, professional and educational institutions. The attached two-page listing gives a summary of those found in the Old Cambridge Burying Ground and elsewhere. … Continue reading Ministers and Lay Leaders

There are many guides in the Boston area and they can all probably add to the pool of anecdata I’m going to record here. Continue reading Tour Attendee Do’s and Don’ts: A Tour Guide’s Wish List