SOAL

05/28/2026

The SOAL Community won an award from the State of Pennsylvania for our grassroots descendant-led, volunteer-powered preservation!!!

About Lincoln Cemetery
Harrisburg, PA’s Lincoln Cemetery was established in 1877, just outside of the city limits, in response to the segregation, overcrowding, and poor condition of burial grounds available to Harrisburg’s African American residents. Described at its founding as a place where the dead could be “laid at rest without any discrimination” and “without distinction of color or creed,” the cemetery reflected the urgent need for a burial ground where Black Harrisburg could bury its dead with dignity. Earlier African American burial grounds in Harrisburg were closed, their graves displaced, and their dead reinterred at Lincoln Cemetery. As a result, Lincoln Cemetery became the central surviving burial landscape for generations of Black residents buried before the mid-twentieth century. The cemetery grounds include stone grave markers and memorials of all types, monuments for veterans, church founders, local leaders, everyday people, and Victorian-era buildings, which were later burned down.

Over time, arson, vandalism, underfunding, altered administrative structures, and inconsistent maintenance damaged both the cemetery landscape and the records needed to understand it. Fires in 1884, 1912, and the 1930s destroyed cemetery buildings and contributed to the loss of early burial records. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the cemetery showed the cumulative effects of decades of neglect and inappropriate maintenance. Today, there are 5,758 burials identified in Lincoln Cemetery, with the earliest marker dating to 1819 for a burial moved to the cemetery and the most recent marker for a 2018 burial.

About SOAL
In 2021, Rachael Keri Williams founded SavingOurAncestorsLegacy (SOAL), a descendant-led grassroots nonprofit dedicated to reclaiming marginalized histories through cemetery preservation, genealogical research, public history, digital technology, and community-based stewardship. While SOAL’s hands-on restoration work began at Lincoln Cemetery in response to the severe deterioration of the cemetery, the organization’s mission reaches far beyond one site. Through Lincoln Cemetery, SOAL has developed a comprehensive preservation model that reconnects burial grounds, archival records, descendants, families, communities, and broader histories of Black migration, institution-building, military service, and survival.

SOAL’s preservation model combines fieldwork, archival research, digital humanities, and public history. Collaborations with educational institutions, public agencies, nonprofit organizations, community groups, and preservation professionals have supported preservation planning, ground-penetrating radar, drone imaging, 3D and multispectral documentation, GIS mapping, digital cemetery documentation, and National Register nomination research.

“Celebrating SOAL and the Stewardship of Lincoln Cemetery”

The Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (Pennsylvania Trails of History) spotlights SOAL as part of Community Initiative Award

Shelby Weaver Splain asked Rachael Keri Williams, founding descendant and Executive Director of SOAL, and Alex M Gurn, SOAL volunteer and Director of Development, to talk more about SOAL’s work.

Read the blog feature here:

Share on Social MediaxfacebooklinkedinThis 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 M...

05/25/2026

Lincoln Cemetery is in urgent need. This is the final resting place of more than 10,000 people, including generations of Harrisburg’s African American community and hundreds of veterans from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Spanish-American War, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond. It is both a sacred burial ground and one of the region’s most important surviving landscapes of Black history.

It should not be overgrown on Memorial Day.

For the past five years, SOAL has led unpaid labor focused on restoration, documentation, research, and historic preservation work. Not to mention neighborhood cleanup and cemetery care. Recently, Wesley Union A.M.E. Zion Church ended its commitment to provide basic mowing at Lincoln Cemetery this year. While SOAL continues to advance preservation and public history efforts, there is currently no clear long-term stewardship plan in place.

If you venture on the cemetery grounds, please stay on the main paths, which we mowed earlier in the week. The tall grass hides ground hog/ fox holes dug throughout, and the extremely uneven ground.

Enter at your own risk. Be safe. Do No Harm

What People Should Not Do
Please do not encourage uncoordinated efforts. Lawn mowers, equipment, digging, improper stone cleaning, or aggressive vegetation removal can permanently damage graves and historic features.

DO NOT drive or park on cemetery grounds. Do not drive on our ancestors.

DO NOT touch, move or clean stones without permission.

DO NOT use w**d killer or chemicals of any kind. Chemical spraying is not safe in a historic cemetery. It will damage grave markers, affect soil, create erosion around stones, and harm a fragile burial landscape and delicate ecosystem.

DO NOT bring or use power tools.

DO NOT remove objects, artifacts or fragments.

DO NOT treat the cemetery as a simple cleanup

The message is simple: please help in ways that protect the cemetery. Do no harm.

Honor the ancestors. Thank you for your care and support.

SOAL is working to coordinate emergency grounds care while continuing to advocate for a responsible long-term solution that places stewardship with the people doing the work.

Donation link in the first comment.

05/22/2026

Say his name. James Richard Wilson. His life and how we buried him.

Black people get buried in history while White people practice the cakewalk at home.

That sentence holds so much of what Rachael Keri Williams illustrates in this ancestor story. James Richard Wilson was not simply “forgotten.” He was buried inside a historical record that was never built to honor Black life or death.

This is why guerrilla archiving is more than digitizing old documents.

It is the process of reclaiming the ancestors from hostile archives. Archives that preserve fragments while distorting the whole person. Archives that hold evidence of people while often stripping away kinship, context, and care.

We have to learn how to gather and read our roots in a hostile archive.

05/20/2026

Tune in early June! SOAL is taping an episode of WGAL News Channel 8‘s In Focus to share the larger story of our descendant-led grassroots preservation work, reclaiming Black history, and the restoration of the Historic Lincoln Cemetery.

For SOAL, preservation is hands-on, research-driven, and community-rooted.

We’re grateful for the opportunity to help bring this work into wider public view. More info on the air date coming soon...

05/19/2026

What was once severed can have some repair. This is why we do radical history reclamation in burial grounds, archives, pension files, letters, family records, and historical fragments. Here, Rachael Keri Williams is rescuing historical data about United States Colored Troops soldiers and their families. Names, marriages, children, testimony, wounds, widows’ claims, and evidence of Black life that too often survives only in scattered records.

These are not just documents. They are family. They are memory. They are proof of history.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper knew that poetry could carry grief, resistance, and repair across generations. SOAL follows that call.

We recover what was forgotten.
We reconnect what was severed.
We build Black memory

05/18/2026

Did you catch the Live on TikTok end of day today? unearthing and re-piecing together the puzzle of submerged headstones from the mid 1800's recovered during SOAL May Restoration Weekend: May 15-17, 2026. More photos and footage coming soon…

05/17/2026

Day 3 of SOAL May Restoration Weekend: May 15-17, 2026 at Harrisburg’s Historic Lincoln Cemetery. Every third Friday, Saturday & Sunday of the month volunteers restore these hallowed grounds. More than 10,000 people are buried here. Hundreds are veterans. Their stones, their names should not be hidden under grass this high. Memorial Day is a week away.

When we have to mow, we can’t do the work of recovering, restoring, repairing, resetting, returning names, reconstructing the records. Building the community archives.

But we can’t restore and preserve these historical artifacts if the grass and w**ds are left to grow unchecked. Focused on opening up the main paths so far, and looking for supporters that may donate a cutting for Memorial Day.

WARNING: Do not come with lawnmowers or w**dwhackers unless coordinated with SOAL. Stones and artifacts are hidden beneath the grass. Uncoordinated mowing can cause permanent damage to our history. That has happened before. Please do no harm.

…in the meantime Rachael Keri Williams found another headstone. Returning volunteers and descendants helped unearth the base and headstone(s). We found a name: Martha.
And a buried metal veteran marker from the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) a fraternal organization of veterans of the Union Army.

Read SOAL’s statement on the grass situation here: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1120730633612113&id=100070255600809&mibextid=wwXIfr

05/16/2026

This is Harrisburg’s Historic Lincoln Cemetery right now — during SOAL’s May Restoration Weekend, just one week before Memorial Day.

For the past five years, SOAL’s working agreement has been that Wesley Union A.M.E Zion Church was responsible for basic mowing, while SOAL carried out restoration, documentation, research, and preservation work.

Wesley Union has now stated that it does not intend to mow Lincoln Cemetery this year. The church has received funds connected to Lincoln Cemetery, including money from the Edyth Guerrant Fund, which we understand to have been intended for the cemetery. Reverend David Miller has stated that the church needed them for the church.

At the same time, Wesley Union has not transferred stewardship of the cemetery to SOAL or created a transparent, accountable long-term plan for its care.

This is a historic Black cemetery with more than 10,000 people buried here, including hundreds of veterans. At Memorial Day, their graves should not be hidden beneath grass so high that headstones, veteran markers, and flags cannot be seen.

The situation is unsustainable. SOAL is working to identify another way to maintain the cemetery, and to transfer stewardship to the people doing the work.

WARNING: Please do not come to the cemetery with lawnmowers. Uncoordinated mowing can do significant damage to historic headstones, grave markers, and curbed plots.

We are asking for public accountability and clear action.

This is sacred ground.
This is Black history.
This is America’s history.

05/16/2026

Technology can help us see history differently. At SOAL, technology tools always begins with people, relationships and responsibility.

We are excited to see Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology highlight the work of our partner at Penn State Harrisburg Dr. Mariah Kupfner, whose public heritage teaching explores VR, 3D scanning, virtual museums, and design thinking as tools for helping students engage with material culture, historic sites, and public interpretation. Many of her students completed interpretive projects based on SOAL’s work.

At SOAL, we are building community-based archives. The goal is to make fragmented and hidden histories visible, connected, teachable, and accountable to the communities they come from.

When students engage with SOAL’s work, they are learning how public history, digital humanities, preservation, and descendant-led stewardship can work together to recover histories that were never meant to disappear.

Read more: https://tlt.psu.edu/2026/02/teaching-with-technology-virtual-reality-3d-scanning-in-humanities-classrooms/

05/16/2026

Thanks WPMT FOX43 and Kyle Ennis TV for the spotlight on SOAL’s historic preservation

Explore how dedicated volunteers are restoring an iconic Black cemetery & uncovering stories of ancestors.