Working With the Rock Ridge Ledger Stones
I spent three weeks last fall measuring and rubbing the ledger stones in the old chapel floor near the ridge. What follows is basically field notes from that project, though I've cleaned them up enough to be readable. Ledger stones are just flattened memorial slabs set flush into church or burial ground floors. At Rock Ridge, they're particularly frustrating because the local sandstone weathers inconsistently. Some inscriptions are razor-sharp after two centuries. Others are half-gone within fifty years of exposure. The ones that survived best are the ones that stayed under pews or rugs for most of their lives. The standard approach is plaster casting or polyurethane rubber rubbings. Plaster picks up detail faster but fails on deep patina or damp stone. Rubber rubbings take longer, maybe twenty minutes per stone if you're careful, but they handle moisture better and don't degrade the surface. I use a soft bristle brush and water-based ink with 100% cotton rag paper for the actual impressions. Cheap newspaper ink transfers too much residue and smears within days.
One thing people miss: the stone orientation matters more than the reading itself. These stones aren't uniformly aligned to cardinal directions. At Rock Ridge, about forty percent of the identifiable stones are rotated anywhere from fifteen to seventy degrees off true north. If you're mapping burial positions relative to each other, not accounting for rotation throws your entire site plan off. I found this out the hard way when my initial arrangement suggested two individuals were buried in direct opposition when they were actually laid parallel to the wall. Repositioning took another afternoon but corrected the whole interpretation. Another counter-intuitive detail: the tool marks around the margins of many of these stones predate the inscription. I initially assumed chisel scars were repair work. They're not. They're from the original quarry dressing process. The inscription was cut separately, often months later. This matters because the dressing style can help date the stone independent of the letterforms, which is useful when the handwriting is worn smooth enough that paleography becomes unreliable. Here's the problem nobody warns you about. The Rock Ridge stone has a specific crystalline layering that splits along fault planes invisible to the naked eye. When humidity drops below forty percent in winter, the surface micro-flaking accelerates. I've seen a fully legible name vanish between one survey session and the next simply because the building was heated without humidification for three weeks. The workaround is straightforward: seal an archival-quality consolidant around the edges of your working area, not over the inscription itself. Paraloid B-72 at ten percent in acetone applied with a fine brush stabilizes the outer millimeter without altering the reading surface. It reverses with fresh acetone if you ever need to strip it. This buys you time to document before conditions worsen again.
For the actual decoding process, I recommend photographing each stone in raking light at dawn and dusk angles before touching it. Digital photography captures depth information that rubbings flatten out. Use a grayscale card in frame and a scale bar. The files themselves are useful later when you're comparing letterform evolution across multiple stones, something you can't do easily with physical rubbings stacked on a table. There are also limitations worth being honest about. Ledger stones at this site preserve maybe sixty percent of original inscriptions with any readable detail. The rest are ghost impressions at best. Cross-referencing with parish burial records from the 1740s through 1820s fills roughly half the gaps. The remaining thirty to forty percent of names and dates simply aren't recoverable without destructive sampling, which nobody's going to approve. If your goal is complete genealogical coverage, you'll hit a wall here. Move on to tombstones in the yard or estate papers stored in the county archive instead. If you want access to the current transcription database I've been maintaining, it's available through the regional historical society's open archives portal. Search for Rock Ridge ledger project and you should find it under recent deposits. The sheet music notation I included in the appendix is probably irrelevant to most people but it shows up on at least three of the stones and I haven't figured out whether it's decorative or mnemonic.
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