The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery has received a Common Heritage grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The $10,000 grant will support two community digitization days, one at the Watertown Free Library on Saturday, October 14, 2017 and one at the Main Branch of the Cambridge Public Library on Friday. October 20, 2017, where members of the public can bring in a range of paper-based archival cultural heritage materials, such as photographs and letters, that help to tell the story of Mount Auburn Cemetery and the nearly 100,000 people buried and commemorated here. During the digitization days, consultants from the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) will hold a series of informational sessions about preserving and digitizing family collections, scan materials, rehouse originals in archival enclosures, and give participants a flash drive with their digital copies–all free of charge. With permission, materials will be used as interpretive and educational content for Mount Auburn’s new mobile app. For more information about scheduling an appointment to digitize your family materials, or to learn more about the project, please contact us at friends@mountauburn.org

The NEH Common Heritage Program supports projects that preserve and make accessible materials important to family and community histories by supporting digitization events and public programming at local cultural organizations. The award to the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery is one of 25 grants made by the agency totaling $293,470. A link to the full award announcement, including a list of all NEH Common Heritage funding recipients, can be found online at: http://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/December2016Grants.