Those Buried in the Metfern Cemetery:
A Yizkor Book and a Website
What is a Yizkor Book? In the wake of the Holocaust, destroyed towns, villages, and shtetls composed “Yizkor Books” - or memorial books. These books told the stories of the town and of the people who lived there. My students decided to compose a Yizkor Book for the 297 people who were buried at the Metfern Cemetery. What was the Metfern Cemetery? What was the Fernald School and Met State Hospital where they’d lived? And what were the stories of each person anonymously buried in that cemetery? Click on the image above to see the Yizkor Book that they created.
Students built a website to both complement the Yizkor Book (see right) and to ensure the MetFern stories were as widely accessible as possible. Click the image above to see that website, learn more about the students’ work, and about the people buried in the cemetery.
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A year after my students produced a nationally recognized exhibit on disability history, my next group of juniors visited the Fernald School, the institution that had inspired that museum project. We then made our way to the Fernald School’s cemetery. In it, 297 people are buried, each of them under only a numbered brick .
We had just recently acquired the names of the people buried there and under which stone each person was interred. Each student was asked to stand by one of the plots and was given an envelope. We then asked the students to open the envelope and read the paper inside. That paper contained two pieces of information - the name of the person buried there and the date that person died.
“And now,” we told the students, “you will find out who they were. Until this moment, the story of each of these people was buried with them. By the end of this year, you will have written a biography for every person and you will share those stories with the world.”
And that is precisely what these students did.
After local and and national news media began covering the work the students were doing (see “Press Coverage of Student Work” for examples) people throughout the country started reaching out to us. Some were former patients at the Met State hospital, some were relatives of patients. Many didn’t know what had happened to their family members who’d been sent to one of the institutions. In one case, a mother told us that she did not know what had happened to her child who’d been brought to the Fernald School as an infant. In each case, when the family wanted it, students helped organize a memorial service at the Metfern Cemetery. Click the image attached to learn more about those stories of reunion and memorial.
Along with the creation of biographies, Yizkor Book, and website, the students designed wayside markers to be placed in the cemetery. Click on the link above to see those markers.
Students were profoundly moved by their work on the Metfern project. Click on the image to above to see the documentary film we created to capture what we learned and experienced over the course of the year.