The "Adopt a Dead Person" Project

These are the support materials for my "Adopt a Dead Person" Project. If you attended my presentation at a conference or listened to an interview about this project on New Hampshire Public Radio's Front Porch and wanted to find out more about this it, you have found the right site.

Here is a short overview of what the "Adopt a Dead Person" project is:

Deerfield, the rural New Hampshire town where I teach has a wealth of old cemeteries - more than 100. Each fall, I take my 8th grade Social Studies classes on a field trip to three of them to study graves. Teams of students choose graves to sketch and map, then they take digital photos of them.

Back in the classroom, each class looks over all the graves studied, then picks one to study.

Over the next month or so, I do as much research of primary sources about the person buried under the gravestone chosen by the class - looking up wills and other probate documents, sending away for military records, etc, then I present the class with whatever information I've been able to uncover.

Each student picks an aspect of the class's "Dead Guy" to study, then researches and writes a project based on that aspect. When all the projects are consolidated, the class has an impressive biography of an otherwise forgotten, average person from their hometown.

All projects are published on a webpage: and CDs with the same work are presented to the town library and local historical society.

Rather than hand out 110+ page packets of support material during my presentation, I've made them available for download here in both Microsoft Word format and as PDFs. All are copyrighted, 2004. Here they are:

Documents