Printer Friendly Version - Christine Nelson: Do You Dig It?

Christine Nelson has been president of the Chester Cemetery Association since last February and is working with other association members to bring added order to the association's records. Photo by Rita Christopher/The Courier

It’s not the kind of thing people talk about often, but that doesn’t bother Christine Nelson, not at all. Christine is comfortable with the subject, more than comfortable actually. She is knowledgeable and articulate about it. About what? Cemeteries, that’s what.

Christine has been president of the Chester Cemetery Association since last February and is working with other association members to bring added order to the association's records. She also points to the importance of the work of two longtime cemetery association members, Alan Cuneo and Lee Foster, in organizing and keeping track of records.

Cemetery plots are deeded burial rights, and owners should record them with the town clerk on the land records, but in many cases over the years, this was not done. As a result, Christine has had to research to verify if the plots are available.

There is more than a question of who owns the plots; there is also the question of who is in them, given the fact that the history of the cemeteries, in some cases, dates to the Colonial era. Grave markers crumble, stones break and names can get lost in the process. Adrian Nichols, a trustee of the cemetery association and the group’s archivist, has been doing research to establish who, in fact, is buried in the graves.

Christine has also been working with Nichols on cleaning gravestones. The lichen that grows on old stones causes them to crack and splinter. The cemetery association has even conducted a grave cleaning workshop this past August attended by 24 cemetery conservationists on the preservation of old graves.

“The assumption has been there are not many [cemetery] plots available,” Christine says, but points out that there are family lots with open and useable spaces. If people have spaces in Chester cemeteries that will not be used, Christine suggests that they contact the Chester Cemetery Association. “People could donate them back to the association if they have no plans to use them,” she says.

In Connecticut, according to Christine, by state statute, cemeteries can only be owned by towns, religious institutions, and cemetery associations. In Chester, the best-known local cemetery is Laurel Hill, off Chester Main Street. There is also a cemetery associated with St. Joseph’s Church, as well as the Old Burying Grounds and the Old Cemetery, both off Goose Hill Road, and the West End Cemetery at Cedar Lake.

There are differences, Christine points out, between burying grounds and cemeteries. Burying grounds, she says, were far more informal and smaller, often near churches. There were usually no rules and often no fees for internment in burying grounds.

Cemeteries, which became more popular in the 19th century, have fees, and regulations, and, as Christine, says, “cemeteries denote planning.”

Christine knew very little about cemeteries when she saw a notice on a town email about the local cemetery association looking for volunteers. She did, however, know quite a bit about planning. She was the town planner in Old Saybrook for some 20 years. Now she is devoting her time to the cemetery work, but spent several months as interim town treasurer in 2023 after longtime Chester Treasurer Liz Netsch retired.

Christine had a surprise when she went to the cemetery association meeting: she was the only person who had come to volunteer, though one other local resident had written to express interest in joining.

You know how it goes when you volunteer for something. Christine was next asked to head a nominating committee to present a slate of trustees for the Chester Cemetery Association for the annual town meeting. She worked hard to fill the board of 11 members with people of diverse backgrounds and ages, as well as those living in different sections of the community. Then the inevitable happened: she was nominated to be the president of the association.

Christine grew up in Barkhamsted in Litchfield County and attended Bryant College (now Bryant University) in Rhode Island. While in college, she read about landscape architecture and thought it might make an interesting career choice. An advisor at Bryant, pointing out it was a business college with little information on landscape architecture, suggested Christine find some landscape architects through the Yellow Pages and talk to them about the profession.

“It involved politics and working with the public. That was more along the lines of what I had learned in business school,” she recalls.

Deciding to pursue town planning, Christine got a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado in Denver.

Now, she has another academic goal: a degree in public history, a discipline that emphasizes historic preservation and restoration, fields that she got interested in through town planning.

Christine and her husband, Mike Conklin, have two daughters, Nora, 11, and Neve, 8. Mike is a musician who plays with Butter Jones; the band is named for the street on which the family lives.

Much of Christine’s time these days is taken up with work involving the cemetery association, but there is one thing she does not have yet: her own cemetery plot. Recently, she asked her mother, after her stepfather’s death, about her final plans.

“I asked her if she would like to be buried down here with me.” Christine says, “So now I guess I’ll have to pick one out.”