About Me

Hello!  My name is Alison Reid and I live in Stratford, Ontario.  I first visited cemeteries as a young girl with my family, paper and crayon in hand, receiving memorable outdoor local history lessons as we made rubbings of the oldest stones.  From those earliest cemetery expeditions, I have been passionate about cemeteries, genealogy, and heritage conservation and preservation.  

Since 2007, I have volunteered as a photographer and database indexer for the Canada GenWeb Cemetery Project, contributing to the historical record thousands of digital images of new and old gravemarkers in Ontario and Quebec.  During these cemetery visits, I was saddened to see how dirty and illegible many of these memorials had become.  Realizing the detrimental effect that dirt and biological growths can have on gravemarkers over time, and having researched best practices for safely cleaning common types of monuments found in Southwestern Ontario, I set out to beautify the memorials that were important to my own family and friends in a way that was gentle to both the stone and to the surrounding environment.

Gravestone inscriptions are one of the many types of "breadcrumbs" humans leave behind as proof of their existence; honouring the individual and collective memory of those who have gone before, and preserving their records (whether on paper or on stone) is my true calling.

I have a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Western Ontario with a course focus in archives and records management.  Some of the other preservation efforts I engage in are digitizing family photos and documents, and researching and reuniting long-lost portrait photographs with the families of the sitters.