About This Project

As a high school kid in Bar Harbor, I used to wander the cemetery wishing the headstones gave me more information about who the people buried below me were. How did they die? What were their lives like? But in those days, finding out meant hours in the basement of the historical society, and I didn't have the time.

Years passed: I moved away, became a teacher, had kids. When the pandemic brought my family back to the island, just down the street from the graveyard, I started researching in earnest, pulling from newly-digitized archives like Maine Memory Net, Digital Maine, Ancestry, and Newspapers.com. Over five years I gathered hundreds of pages, then narrowed them to seven graves that, together, trace the settler-colonial history of Mount Desert Island: the National Park, Gilded Age tourism, the Revolutionary War.

AI finally made it shareable: Claude Code helped me build the site, Midjourney and Runway turned archival images into animation, and when AI narration fell short, an old high school friend (a voice actor) performed the scripts. My friend Anne illustrated the map, and Genie, Nikki, and Anna Durrand offered context, encouragement, and a willingness to share whatever came of it.