Sacajawea DAR Grave Restoration Journal: Ways You Can Help

Cleaning & Restoration

Obviously, the most straightforward way to help us restore and clean graves is to restore and clean them with us but we know that this isn't possible for everyone. Lots of Daughters have full-time jobs or families at home; others have physical limitations.

It is possible to restore graves with us if you have limited mobility as there are some full-sized statues and tall gravestones in the park. However, most of the time, the cleaning happens on your hands and knees, in the grass, with cold water. A lot of us find the work a great form of exercise and meditation while others... well, others disagree. Only work as you feel able and comfortable.

Donating Goods

When we first took on this project, we didn't realize how much stuff was required for grave restoration! Some of these items are straightforward, others are weird, all of them are useful. We are always in need of the following:

Buckets, gallon-sized or larger
Old bread knives or other serrated knives
Baby oil
Plastic putty knives
Small hoses
Dusting brooms or whisk brooms
Soft scrub brushes
Orvus (yes, the quilt soap!)
Plastic grocery bags
Parrafin wax
Disposable shop towels
400 grit (or higher) sandpaper
Rubber gloves (the dishwashing kind or thicker)
Empty spray bottles
Old, lint-free towels
Kneeling pads

Uploads and Updates to Find a Grave

You can do most of this work from home. We are trying to catalog any graves that we have worked on that are not on findagrave.com. We have a few volunteers who have offered to help with this Herculean task but we always need more. If you can work in pairs, you can even have one person in charge of photos and the other in charge of work online.

Financial Donations

The product we use most for restoration (not cleaning) is called D2. It is one of the only products on the market designed to remove impurities from masonry without damaging it, meaning it pulls the pollution out of the stone while leaving the stone behind. It can sometimes take up to a year to work fully, though you usually see results within minutes. This is the product they use at Arlington National Cemetery, which means we trust it here.

There are two drawbacks to D2: It's sometimes hard to come by and it's expensive. You can't find it in stores and it's often on backorder online. If you donate financially to the grave restoration project, I can almost guarantee that every dime will go to D2.

The current going rate for D2 is almost $20 for a quart and almost $45 for a gallon. This doesn't include any tax or shipping charges.

If you would like to purchase D2 for us directly, we certainly won't stop you! Use coupon code AMSPIRIT for 10% of D2 from AtlasPreservation.com thanks to American Spirit Magainze (a DAR magazine).