As a genealogical researcher and historian with more than 40 years of experience, and who is honored to serve since 2011 as the Pekin Public Library's expert in the history of Pekin and Tazewell County, Illinois, I'm very glad to do what I can to help memorialise the lives of beloved family, ancestors, and friends and to assist in preserving the deeds and hopes of those who've gone before us. Any photos I take of gravestones that I share here of course become, as explained in Find-A-Grave's Terms of Service for its contributors, the shared and treasured patrimony of the human family -- feel free to use them to illustrate your own family records and charts (but please cite where you got the photo and who took the picture).

Despite the confusion of many, Find-A-Grave exists both to memorialise love ones and ancestors as well as to aid in genealogical research. Consequently, if you can supply evidence, I of course am happy to add any biographical or genealogical information you may have to the memorials in my charge, especially genealogical links or evidence that corrects or augments gravestone inscriptions.

Please avoid adding images of obituaries or death certificates. Obituaries and death certificate information belong in the "biography." That allows room for more photographs to be added to Memorials.

"The profit of my living long ago

I dedicated to the unloving dead,

Though all my service they shall never know

Whose world is vanished and their name unsaid.

For none remembers now the good, the ill

They did, the deeds they thought should last for aye;

But in the little room my voice can fill

They shall not be forgotten till I die.

So, in a lonely churchyard by the shore,

The sea winds sift the sand across the mounds

And those forgotten graves are found no more,

And no man knows the churchyard's holy bounds;

Till one comes by and stoops with reverent hands

To clear the graves of their encumbering sands."

-- Author Unknown, quoted in B. Frank Severance's History of the Stewarts of Londonderry