This week’s 2025 Community Initiative Award winner spotlight is on Lincoln Cemetery and Saving Our Ancestors Legacy (SOAL), the group preserving the cemetery, in the Borough of Penbrook, Dauphin County.
We covered a bit about Lincoln Cemetery and SOAL in our May 6th post announcing the cemetery as one of the three 2025 winners. Check it out here if you need a refresher.
For this post, I asked Rachel Keri Williams, founder and Executive Director of SOAL, and Alex Gurn, PhD, SOAL volunteer and Board of Directors member, to tell our readers a bit more about this story.
Drone footage of Lincoln Cemetery, 2023. Source: https://digitalharrisburg.com/2023/05/03/blossoming-of-lincoln-cemetery/.
Can you tell us a little bit about Lincoln Cemetery and how you first became aware of it?
Rachael: I first became aware of Lincoln Cemetery in 1989, when my paternal grandfather died and was buried there. His sister, my great-aunt Olive, was also buried there, so my first connection to Lincoln Cemetery was personal and genealogical before I understood its larger historical significance as a historically Black cemetery.
My father always said he was the last of both of his family lines. He was an only child, and after my grandparents and great-aunt were gone, our connection to that part of the family felt like it had died with them. Over time, through DNA testing, family letters, photographs, tintypes, ephemera, and archival research, I began reconstructing our family’s history and reconnecting with cousins in Adams County and Dauphin County. In June 2021, after visiting the cemetery at Yellow Hill and finding that the headstones there were gone, we came to Lincoln Cemetery expecting something different. Instead, we found holes into graves, human bones, and coffin handles on the ground. That moment changed everything.
SOAL founder, Rachael Keri Williams. Photo credit: Alex Gurn.
Alex: I first learned about Lincoln Cemetery through Rachael, but not as a stranger to her life. We have been close friends since high school, so when she found the site in the neglected state it was, I was shocked and drawn in. I read and asked questions. I shared posts and event announcements and asked friends to donate. Still, it took me over a year to show up.
That matters because it reflects a reality of volunteer-based Black history reclamation. Everyone comes to this work on their own trajectory. It can take time to move from awareness, to understanding, to feeling responsibility, to actually showing up and returning again. I cared from the start, but caring is not the same as becoming accountable to the work. Even people who care may still need to be taught how to see the urgency clearly enough to act. Black communities often have to make the evidence of harm legible again and again and again before people, resources, and institutions move. Not symbolically, but materially.
I think many people would be defeated by the prospect of turning around an abandoned cemetery. Where did you get the idea to create SOAL? Did you bring some personal experience to create a group like SOAL or were you starting from scratch?
Rachael: At the beginning, I was not thinking in terms of “turning around an abandoned cemetery.” I live in Buffalo, New York, and what I honestly believed was that people simply did not know there were ancestral remains exposed on the surface of the ground. I had researched the trade in human remains, so I knew that the situation was not only painful and disrespectful. It also placed our ancestors’ remains at real risk.
The urgency came from fear, grief, and responsibility. I knew what has happened to so many Black burial grounds across this country: they are neglected, erased, paved over, built on, or reduced to a single monument that stands in for thousands of lives. Lincoln Cemetery holds tens of thousands of people, including Harrisburg’s entire Black population back to the 1700s. When I saw what was happening there, I felt that if I had a chance to stop that kind of erasure from happening again, I had to do something.
SOAL began from that need. I did not start with a full plan, and I had not spent a lot of time in cemeteries before. What I did have was experience with historical research, genealogy, archives, outdoor leadership, academic spaces, art, technology, and building new things from the ground up.
Saving Our Ancestors Legacy (SOAL) artwork.
After reading SOAL’s website, I learned more about the partnerships you developed to benefit Lincoln Cemetery, like a Shippensburg professor and students preparing the National Register nomination. How did you find and develop these relationships? Was that something you expected to do when you founded SOAL or something you realized later?
Rachael: I live about 300 miles away, so I did not come to this thinking that a few cleanup days were going to be enough. We started as a group of people trying to care for hallowed ground from at least a state away—and we didn’t know anyone in Harrisburg. We were facing a complete lack of public awareness about how historically significant Lincoln Cemetery was. So almost immediately, the work became two things at once: raise awareness and build relationships.
Even before our organization was named, SOAL’s work began with the ideation of WebAnansi, a collaborative platform designed to heal archival violence: reconnect names, records, families, places, and communities. At Harrisburg’s Lincoln Cemetery, that same work became visible in the landscape: a neglected Black cemetery where the archive itself had been buried, damaged, and made impossible to read.
Harrisburg’s Historic Lincoln Cemetery, main gate. Photo credit: Alex Gurn.
Lincoln Cemetery needs many kinds of people encountering it in many different ways. We need students and professors, yes, but also artists, musicians, churches, genealogists, cemetery preservationists, youth groups, local volunteers, technologists, and descendants.
Through Action for Heritage, SOAL is building the community to create the infrastructure to mobilize people to preserve endangered cultural memory in cemeteries, family collections, local archives, institutions, and communities across the country. Our preservation model is recover the names, reconnect the evidence, restore the relationships, and make invisible histories legible again.
Our first university partnerships were with Messiah University and Harrisburg University, through the digital humanities, public history, and geospatial work happening there. I first met Dr. David Pettegrew at Lincoln Cemetery after Dr. Jean Corey introduced us, and that relationship helped open up a whole way of thinking about Lincoln Cemetery as a digital public humanities project, not only a cemetery restoration project. Messiah students worked with ArcGIS and public history, while Harrisburg University’s Center for Applied Environmental & Geospatial Technology, led by Albert Sarvis, brought drone imagery, geospatial tools, scanning, and hands-on technical support into the work. That early mapping partnership mattered because it helped us start to see the cemetery as a landscape full of recoverable names, relationships, evidence, and stories — not just damage.
Harrisburg University Geospatial Team prepare a drone for work at Lincoln Cemetery, 2023 Source: https://lincolncemetery.org/index.php/soal-partners-black-cemetery-historic-preservation-with-arcgis/.
Shippensburg University and Dr. Steven Burg came later with the National Register nomination, and that was another important layer of recognition. But the larger story is that we realized very quickly that Lincoln Cemetery needed many kinds of people encountering it in many different ways. We needed students and professors, yes, but also artists, musicians, churches, genealogists, cemetery preservationists, youth groups, local volunteers, technologists, descendants, and other Black cemetery organizations who understood this work from the inside.
That is why it meant so much when Sharia Benn and Sankofa African American Theatre Company created Voices of the Eighth Part III: Hallowed Ground, inspired in part by SOAL’s work at Lincoln Cemetery. It meant that the cemetery had entered the arts, the stage, poetry, and public imagination, not only grant reports and preservation documents. Michael Farrow from Buffalo has also created music through and around this work, and that matters to me too, because music, theater, poetry, storytelling, mapping, and restoration all reach people differently. Some people understand history through records. Some understand it when they are standing in the cemetery with a shovel in their hand. Some understand it when they hear a song or see a character on stage realize that the ancestors are not abstract. They are right there.
Beyond the partnerships you’ve mentioned, what other types of support does SOAL need or want?
SOAL needs support that builds durable capacity that can sustain this grassroots work. We need unrestricted funding to support day-to-day operations; paid staff to coordinate volunteers, deployments, partnerships, and records management; digitization equipment to capture fragile materials before they deteriorate; secure archival storage for rescued documents and digital files; technology funding to build WebAnansi; preservation supplies for fieldwork; and legal, ethical, and technical guidance to ensure this work remains accountable to descendants and communities. We need cross-sector partners that understand and respect descendant leadership and community control. It requires trust, shared power, and material support.
What’s next for SOAL and Lincoln Cemetery?
Rachael: Lincoln Cemetery is a sacred archive. It holds the people who carried Black Harrisburg through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even when the neighborhoods they built were demolished or erased. The cemetery matters because the people are still there, and because descendants are still trying to find them. That is why we have to invest in Black cemeteries the way we invest in libraries, museums, schools, archives, and public parks. Once this history is gone, it is not easily recovered.
Alex: What’s next for SOAL is scale. We must move from a powerful proof of concept into a broader, fully funded model for rescuing and preserving Black history before it disappears. SOAL is building out the WebAnansi digital platform so that the histories we recover can be understood relationally — not as isolated names in separate databases, but as people connected to one another across time and place.
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