Below is a reply I received on the "Find A Grave" forums where I periodically add postings.
The "Stone Centre Inc." who posted the comments is a monument company located in Canada.
Just followed a link in one of your postings on findagrave.com to the Ohio Genealogical Society site. I had no idea Ohio was so active! You guys are doing an awesome job!
I read some of the material on the site and was very impressed by the common sense approach. I have worked in the monument industry for 30 years and in a family business that is this year celebrating our 100th anniversary. I am seriously interested in genealogy so understand fully the importance of restoration/ maintenance and very much the problems of dealing with cemeteries. I read the following article on your site:
Directions in Graveyard Preservation:
A Look Back and Some Suggestions to Start the New Millenium
Lynette Strangstad
© 1999, Lynette Strangstad and agree with a great deal of it but was struck by one very important missing aspect for the Future.
In my humble opinion...in addition to caring for what we have and restoring what we can...we need to educate the public about the fact that we need to be more careful about our memorials that we are buying now...we need to start working toward educating people that if they plan to buy a memorial....we should strive for what I call "permanent memorialization".
So far as I know the idea of "permanent memorialization is a concept is my own idea. I would like to see us working toward educating the public that our cemeteries are an important part of our heritage, and that as such, we need to encourage people to buy "permanent memorials" so that we will not be faced with the problems of deterioration that we have in our cemeteries today. I was hoping you might want to bring this idea forward to the membership.
The people we are putting up memorials for today, are the people that our great grandchildren (et al) will be researching. We are committing the same sins our ancestors did when we buy flat markers, benches that will be removed in 25 years, bronze plaques on boulders by a pond, a brick in a wall, a tree with a plaque in front of it...all very nice for now, a 12x12 tile in a niche or columbarium ... nice, convenient and pretty for now... but NOT permanent!
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Allison
The Stone Centre Inc.
