Facilitate a biweekly history group that explores cemeteries, obituaries, and death records to uncover erased or forgotten stories.

Run a biweekly online group where participants use local cemeteries, obituaries, and death records as entry points into histories that have been erased, buried, or forgotten. The focus is on deaths that occurred roughly 80 or more years ago, far enough back that the research is unlikely to affect living relatives.

Each meeting, the facilitator gives the group an assignment to carry out in their own communities during the off-week. For example: look for the graves of people who were excommunicated or otherwise not allowed to be buried with the rest of the community, and try to find out why. Or search local coroner's reports for causes of death that reveal hazards from the past we do not see today. Or investigate the meaning of an assigned symbol commonly found on gravestones and find examples in a local cemetery. Participants do not need to be in the same geographic area. That is part of what makes this interesting: the same assignment produces different findings in different places.

The biweekly sessions are where participants share what they found, ask questions, get advice on research dead ends, and receive their next assignment. The facilitator should bring enough context to frame each assignment (why this kind of record matters, what patterns to look for, what these sources tend to reveal and conceal), but the group's own discoveries are the center of each meeting.

Morbid curiosity is welcome here. So is humor. This is a group for people who find death records genuinely fascinating, not people who need to be talked into caring about them. The tone should be curious, engaged, and respectful of the dead.

The group caps at 10 participants. If the group grows beyond what one person can handle, we will recruit a co-facilitator.

Essential skills:

• Interest in local history, genealogy, or archival research
• Comfort facilitating discussion around sensitive topics including death, racism, and historical violence
• Ability to design assignments that work for participants in different locations
• Willingness to learn alongside the group

NOT required:

• Formal training in history, genealogy, or archival science
• Access to physical cemeteries (all research can be conducted digitally)

Operative must provide:

• An account with the digital platform that will host the club meetings
• Preparation of assignments and framing material for each session
• Between-session engagement in the Discord channel
• Promotion and participant recruitment for the club

MFU will provide:

• An interest form on the MFU website to help identify the best times for the meetings
• A scheduling app on the MFU website that allows people to sign up for the club
• A channel on the MFU Discord server for meetings and between-session discussion
• Help locating research resources, if needed
• Promotion and participant recruitment for the club

You are welcome to use these sources to help you get started:

• Find A Grave is one of the largest online cemetery databases, with nearly 160 million entries worldwide. Entries often include photographs, GPS coordinates, and links to relatives. Useful both as a research tool and as a source of assignments for participants.
• Family Tree Magazine's guide to cemetery genealogy research walks through how to use courthouse records, funeral home files, and cemetery maps to trace stories that tombstones alone do not tell.
• The Tampa Bay Times' investigation into forgotten cemeteries documents how burial grounds for Black communities in the Tampa Bay area were paved over and rediscovered through archival research. A strong example of the kind of story this group can uncover.
• The Monroe County Coroner Reports (1895-1935), hosted by the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington, Indiana, are a sample of the kind of local records that exist in many communities. Browsing them reveals causes of death, occupational hazards, and social conditions that rarely appear in other sources.

For general questions, you can message your handler through your dashboard, contact @Owlett on Discord, or email info@myflyinguniversity.org.

If you have an idea for a different approach to all or part of this mission, please feel free to reach out before you get started!