CRISFIELD, Md. - An abandoned cemetery in Crisfield is getting some help.
Joe Paden, a preservationist with the cemetery says he's been working on restoring graves for almost 20 years. He and his kids have been trying to keep the history alive.
It's one of the largest cemetery's in lower Somerset County. After the civil war, this area was given to the African American community to bury their people here. But now, graves are being lost and forgotten. They're cracked due to falling trees, lost underneath the brush, or collapsed deep into the ground.
"When we started I was told there was possibly a couple hundred. Then, we got up to over 300. Then, over 500 hundred and now were up to 750," says Paden.
Recovering graves hidden under the brush starts with markings.
"Number one is we're marking them to make sure we know where the graves are. We're marking them, were counting them, then we're coming back to make sure there's no stones. We're probing. We're trying to get the vines off of them because the vines collapses them and crushes them," says Paden.
When Paden is walking through the cemetery looking underneath the weeds and ivy he'll find graves that don't have a tombstone or a name attached. So he'll go back and do extensive research through records to find out who is in the plot of land. He says his top priority is finding the name and history of this person and not just saving the stone."
Within the cemetery you will also find tombstones that are hand-scratched. Paden says that can take a long time. He says, "There's a lot of homemade stones in here where people make their own stones and scratch their names. If somebody loved their mom that much to scratch their own stone, they deserve to be remembered."
Joe says there is a belief that there are many more graves that have not been found and the constant growing brush makes it a fight against time.
There will be a volunteer event to help Joe on Dec. 2.
Visit the GoFundMe here.