Why photograph tombstones?
Using shaving cream — applied and then scraped flat against the stone with a plastic squeegie so that it fills in depressions — is as effective as it is controversial. It works much better than rubbings or any other methods we have ever tried. Of all cemetery restoration methods, this has become the most debated practice. We do use shaving cream as a last resort for an illegible stone for our direct ancestors, avoiding brands with stearic acid (use palmitic brands instead). And we do take gallons of water to rinse a stone, rather than the traditional spray mist bottle, and we also dry the stone. We douse it and use a toothbrush to remove all residue possible. The “pro” argument for shaving cream is that the stones are becoming illegible to any other method of reading, and this movement to photograph and record gravestones leads to a certain preservation of disappearing information.
