Scattered throughout the rural landscape of eastern North Carolina is an important yet often avoided phenomenon: cemeteries. They’re found on street corners and in deserted cornfields, in churchyards and on marshy shorelines. For centuries, local families have laid their loved ones to rest on the sandy beaches of Dare County. Inclement weather and the passing of time have worn away many of the tombstones’ details, while development and negligent farming have destroyed numerous local gravesites. And while the welfare of countless other burial sites remains in constant jeopardy, two women have devoted more than a decade to preserving the memories for local families.

Lois Johnson Meekins and Amy Midgett Gamiel have spent a large portion of their time researching and documenting local cemeteries in hopes of preserving memories and learning more about their own family lineage. Not only did these women research and record the final resting places of the local population reaching back to the 1600s, they also studied and documented the marriages and birth records for every citizen of Dare County. The result is Sacred to Their Memory: Dare County, NC Cemeteries, a remarkable book that documents local burial sites and their accompanying sentiments.

Fire ants, prickly pear cacti, blood-sucking ticks, territorial snakes and protective property owners are several of the hazards that Meekins and Gamiel faced for 10 years in order to complete their project.

Each woman has ancestors who lived along the shores of the Outer Banks going back for hundreds of years. Gamiel and Meekins have interests in the same family lineage and are members of the Albemarle Genealogical Society, which was formed over 20 years ago to provide discussion opportunities for those studying their own family lineage.

Lois Meekins’s story is fascinating, her patience vast and unending, her kindness and dedication to others refreshing. Her den is cozy and comfortable. Research spills out from multiple file cabinets; volumes of notebooks and journals rest on the numerous bookshelves. Every inch of this magical corner contains valuable information regarding someone’s father or wife, brother or sister. Images of a college professor’s office flash through my mind.

"What prompted me to do this [project] was being active in the genealogical society here in the county. And we started this book…," Meekins begins.

The women began by obtaining maps and related information from the Department of Transportation "to get their sights set on different places." They then asked that anyone who had a record of any cemetery share it with them. "First we did Stumpy Point and East Lake," Meekins says. "We surveyed all of the broken stones, sunken places and misplaced things, and recorded our observations of what was going on in each cemetery. We clocked our mileage from state roads so anyone could find his or her way back.

"In Stumpy Point, the graves are so low that when they bury their dead down there they have to put a big concrete slab over the tomb," Meekins adds.

The women employed creative methods to reveal the now-faint inscriptions of these ancient weather-beaten stones. "We used shaving cream," says Meekins. "You just wipe it right across [the stone] and you can see the words really well. Of course, we smelled like a man who had been shaving. We were so overwhelmed by the smell sometimes we wouldn’t even go in a place and eat."

Information in the book is presented in such a way as to allow the reader to distinguish what was actually copied from a stone and what was material from other sources. Such attention to detail will allow someone to determine if there was once a gravesite at a location missing a stone.

When asked who funded this project, Meekins laughs. "I funded it," she says, and we’re still in the hole." Her dedication runs deep into her soul, and her bank account.

Weeks after this insightful interview, I traveled to a local cemetery in Colington, to witness the women practicing their fieldwork. The interaction between these graveyard researchers revealed their deep knowledge of the history and heritage of the Outer Banks’s true locals. On this narrow strip of land, paths cross repeatedly over time. The lives of these locals have remained connected, intertwined for centuries through blood and marriage.