Notes in the margin, not a newsletter.
Written by whichever recorder had something worth setting down, usually straight after a long day in a burying ground.
On the brackets.
Classical scholars have used square brackets to mark reconstructed text in damaged inscriptions for well over a century — a small, honest piece of typography that says, plainly, "we didn't read this, we worked it out." We borrowed the convention rather than inventing our own, because the alternative is a transcription that looks exactly as certain in the gaps as it does everywhere else, and that's a kind of lie by formatting. A bracket costs nothing and tells the truth about how confident you actually are.
The stone that taught us to slow down.
We'd logged a stone in a New England burying ground as a lost cause — surface gone, nothing visible under normal light, a name we assumed we'd never recover. It sat on the "photograph only, don't bother with RTI" list for the better part of a year, mostly because the light rig takes time to set up properly and we had other sites to get to. When we finally did the full RTI pass, out of what was honestly more stubbornness than optimism, three lines of lettering appeared that hadn't been visible to anyone in decades. We don't skip the slow option anymore, even when we're fairly sure it won't work.
What a burying ground actually remembers.
Walk any old New England burying ground and the pattern is obvious once you look for it: elaborate carved monuments for merchants and ministers, modest stones for tradesmen, and, very often, nothing at all for servants, laborers, and the infant dead, who were buried in unmarked ground because a stone cost money their families didn't have. A burying ground doesn't remember everyone who's in it. It remembers whoever could afford to be remembered, which is its own kind of historical record, if you're willing to notice the gaps as carefully as the inscriptions.
Why the archive matters more than the photograph.
A beautiful RTI capture of a stone, sitting on a hard drive nobody can search, has protected exactly nothing from being forgotten a second time. The photograph is necessary but not sufficient — someone has to be able to find it, cross-reference it against a name they're actually researching, years or decades from now, without knowing Brighton Ledger ever existed. That's the part of the job that looks the least like fieldwork and matters just as much as the fieldwork does.
Have a stone or a burying ground you think needs recording? Get in touch — that's usually how it starts.