Politics
Removing Moss and Grime From Gravestones, She Reveals Forgotten History
As she scrubs centuries’ worth of dirt and mold off gravestones, Katie DeRaddo tells her TikTok followers the stories of those buried beneath them.
Greenvale Rural Cemetery sits beside the Erie Canal in Fairport, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. Massive oak trees cast leafy shade over the rows of graves — large tombstones, mausoleums, slanted markers and plaques.
On a typical morning, the only soundtrack is birdsong, cicadas and the occasional horn from a train passing nearby. And sometimes, the sound of rhythmic scraping or the soft noise of brush bristles on stone.
This is where Katie DeRaddo gets to work, scrubbing, washing and chipping away dirt and grime from some of the thousands of centuries-old gravestones that surround the Rochester area.
Ms. DeRaddo usually reports to Greenvale one morning a week and stays for hours, hauling two large tanks of water, gardening gloves, trowels and scrapers from grave to grave. She pauses only to press record on her phone, perched atop a tripod, or adjust the miniature mic stand she has fashioned out of a toothpick.
Later, she scours Ancestry.com, FindAGrave.com and Newspapers.com, hoping to piece together the histories of the people whose graves she has uncovered. Then she pairs short videos of herself cleaning their headstones with narration about their lives.
Ms. DeRaddo, 29, is part of a wave of social media creators invested in grave cleaning, providing content for an audience sometimes referred to as “GraveTok.”
