As the rest of the team knows, Lydia Crane, the Club’s dedicated Recording Secretary for over 15 years, has held a special place in my heart over the course of our transcribing. There’s something about her tireless devotion to the Club and her attention to detail in recording minutes. Every detail, that is, other than clues to who she was herself.

I’ve been looking more into Lydia and seeing what I could find about her. I was thrilled when Sydney found her memorial on Find a Grave, which tells me she was born on July 22, 1833 (happy 184th birthday, Lydia!), and died May 4, 1916. This also showed me who her father was, William Crane. Crane founded Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society in 1815, opposed slavery, but also did not call himself an abolitionist, as he criticized them as harshly as he did secessionists. I’ll probably write more about him later, as he was a fascinating figure.

And of course, endless information is available about him, while nearly nothing can be found about Miss Lydia Crane.

Yesterday, when we visited Green Mount Cemetery I was particularly excited to find her grave. We had the location of William Crane’s grave from findagrave.com, and I was confident that Lydia would be right there with him.

But, as Sydney mentioned, we couldn’t find her. Or maybe we did, but her grave is weathered arguably beyond recovery.

I was disappointed, to say the least. I tried fiddling with that photo over and over again in Photoshop, and so far this is the best I could do:

The black and white and dark contrast makes the ‘Crane’ a tiny bit easier to decipher, but even then it’s a shot in the dark. I wont give up on this though–I’ve already asked my dad, a photographer, to come with me to the cemetery with his DSLR camera and off-camera flash, which supposedly will help make the shadows work more in our favor to decipher the inscription. I’d also like to do an etching.

I might seem crazy for the lengths I’m going to to try to uncover Miss Crane’s memorial, especially considering we already do know her first name along with her birth and death dates, which is more than we know about many of the Club’s women. But it troubles me that someone as vital to the Club’s history as her could nearly disappear herself from history. A woman with such detailed accounts of something should at least have a legible gravestone.

Sydney suggested I also contact the woman who published Lydia’s memorial on Find a Grave, which I did this afternoon. Her profile on the site boasts an astonishing 992 memorials added to the database, almost 100 of them with the surname ‘Crane’. I’m interested to know what her connection with the Crane family is, and if all 100 of these Cranes, spanning various generations and locations, might be her ancestors or simply people she’s intrigued in. Lydia Crane could just be a name to her, or maybe she knows something more.