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SOAL SOAL: SavingOurAncestorsLegacy is a descendant-led volunteer-based 501c3! Restoring Lincoln Cemetery! SOAL is a 100% Volunteer-Based organization.
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Our efforts to restore Lincoln Cemetery are paid for by our volunteers and your contributions.

10/08/2026

What will you keep alive?

Don’t lose faith. Activate your activism.

Print a historical photograph. Learn the person’s name. Share a letter in an ancestor’s own handwriting. Find out whose name your street carries, and what the signs leave unsaid. Bring that history into a classroom, a community gathering, an everyday conversation.

Make our history part of the fabric of everything.

At SOAL, that work takes root at Lincoln Cemetery. Recovering names, tracing relationships, caring for burial places, and helping descendants reconnect with their ancestors. Join us next week for SOAL October Restoration, Oct 16-18, noon til dusk. On Saturday Oct. 17th: Plant the Next Century: Community Tree Planting at Historic Lincoln Cemetery

Through Action4Heritage, we’re building a community to preserve endangered archives and bring those histories into public view. Open meetings Saturdays at 3pm.

Join a project—or start one.

https://linktr.ee/savingourancestorslegacy

www.Action4Heritage.org

10/04/2026

After a day of workshops and dialogue, Rachael slept outside beneath the International African American Museum in Charleston with The Slave Dwelling Project. Folks gathered at Gadsden’s Wharf, one of the most significant sites of the transatlantic slave trade in North America, where tens of thousands of captive Africans were brought ashore.

The museum rises above this ground, leaving space beneath it for the land and its history to remain visible, accessible, and honored. Participants slept where that history happened.

The overnight carries forward a practice Joseph McGill Jr. began in 2010: sleeping in surviving slave dwellings to draw attention to places neglected, erased, or interpreted without centering the people who actually lived there. Staying becomes an act of attention and remembrance, a commitment to confronting slavery’s history and its continuing impact.

At Gadsden’s Wharf, that attention reaches toward people whose lives began far across the water. People with names, languages, knowledge, and relationships. People whose full humanity asks more of us than a count of those brought ashore.

A night beside the water becomes a responsibility carried home.

To remain present. To protect Black archives and memory. To carry history forward with care.

Sources: International African American Museum; The Slave Dwelling Project.

10/04/2026

Our ancestors’ lives exceeded the borders drawn around them. In “From Hold to Seashell: Ancestral Roots to Revolutionary Routes,” Rachael Keri Williams invited participants at The Slave Dwelling Project conference to rethink Black geographies and the limitations of colonial maps, tracing the ties of kinship, knowledge, and resistance that connect our ancestors’ life worlds to each other and to our own.

What becomes possible when we map the relationships the ancestors sustained and the worlds they made, beyond the boundaries imposed on their lives?

Plant a tree. Leave a legacy. 🌳 Bring a shovel if you’ve got oneJoin SOAL on Saturday, October 17, noon–dusk, for a spec...
10/02/2026

Plant a tree. Leave a legacy. 🌳 Bring a shovel if you’ve got one

Join SOAL on Saturday, October 17, noon–dusk, for a special community tree planting at Historic Lincoln Cemetery in Harrisburg, PA.

We’ll be planting dozens of donated* native trees to help renew the canopy of this historic Black cemetery—and we need volunteers

Event page: Plant the Next Century: Community Tree Planting at Historic Lincoln Cemetery
📅 Saturday, October 17

Please RSVP on the link so we can estimate volunteers and supplies—and share the event with your networks.

Bring a shovel if you have one! We also recommend work gloves, water, sturdy shoes, and clothes you don’t mind getting dirty.

This is part of SOAL’s October Restoration Weekend: October 16–18, noon to dusk.

📍 Lincoln Cemetery, 201 S. 30th St., Harrisburg (Susquehanna / Penbrook), Dauphin County, PA

*special thanks! The trees are from the Roots, Branches, & Hands program (PA IPL) at https://paipl.us/get-involved/programs/

Tree restoration supported by Dauphin County and Susquehanna Township

Something New Is Taking Root at Lincoln.For years, SOAL has fought to bring Historic Lincoln Cemetery back from decades ...
10/02/2026

Something New Is Taking Root at Lincoln.

For years, SOAL has fought to bring Historic Lincoln Cemetery back from decades of neglect — uncovering graves, restoring monuments, reconnecting descendants with ancestors, and recovering histories that had nearly disappeared with the landscape.

But rescue is not the same as sustainability.
The equation must change.

A long-standing source of support for routine grass cutting from the historically recognized owner ended abruptly. We were left with an urgent question. How do we sustainably care for 7 acres of historic burial ground—filled with thousands of delicate graves, fragile monuments, recovering trees, and irreplaceable history—without simply fighting the same battle against overgrowth again and again?

Today, SOAL submitted a formal request to Dauphin County, PA for sponsorship of a Local Share proposal built around a different way of thinking about community stewardship.

Lincoln Cemetery is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The landscape itself is an archive, holding generations of Black family history, service, community institutions, migration patterns, resistance, solidarity, loss, survival, and memory.

Every grave we recover matters.
Every monument we can preserve matters.
Every name we recover opens another door.

How do we make sure this Black archive never has to be rescued from erasure again?

We think this proposal is part of the answer.
Want to help? Tell the Dauphin County Commissioners what Lincoln Cemetery means to you, and why this nationally recognized, historically overlooked place deserves a sustainable future. Share your connection, your family’s story, or simply why preserving Black history in Dauphin County matters.

Dauphin County Commissioners’ meetings are held every Wednesday at 10am at the Dauphin County Admin Building, 2 S. Second Street, Harrisburg, in the 4th Floor Hearing Room

Commissioners Office phone: 717-780-6300

Contact the Commissioners⁠ online: https://www.dauphincounty.gov/government/publicly-elected-officials/commissioners/contact-the-commissioners

Across the country, historic cemeteries are deteriorating as the churches, associations, families, and funding systems t...
09/24/2026

Across the country, historic cemeteries are deteriorating as the churches, associations, families, and funding systems that once sustained them disappear. What might look to you like overgrown grass or an untended lot is often something much larger: the gradual loss of community archives that may exist nowhere else.

CBS 21 brought that national problem home to Central Pennsylvania, showing communities struggling with the ongoing, generational cost and responsibility of caring for historic burial grounds, and visiting Dauphin County, PA’s Historic Lincoln Cemetery to see what grassroots preservation and its obstacles look like.

SOAL knows how deep that work goes and just how difficult it is to sustain.

For many Black communities, burial grounds hold evidence that was never adequately preserved elsewhere. Names, family relationships, military service, churches, mutual aid societies, migrations, neighborhoods built and paved over, and lives too often excluded from traditional archives.

The visible neglect is only the surface of the problem.

Old cemeteries create permanent obligations, while the institutions and organizations meant to care for them can disappear. Churches shrink or close. Cemetery associations get disbanded, and the funds taken. Families move away. Volunteer leaders burn out. Records are scattered or burned by arson. And when a cemetery fills and burials decline, one of its principal sources of revenue can dry up, while grass maintenance, trees, access, fencing, recordkeeping, and monument care continue indefinitely.

For historic Black cemeteries, it is compounded by a much longer history. Many were established because racial segregation excluded Black people from being buried in White burial grounds. Black communities were disrupted by disinvestment, highways, redevelopment, displacement, redlining, and other systemic issues.

Preservation requires perpetual care. Systems capable and willing to protect the historic place, the Black archives, and the people whose histories they hold for generations to come.

Thank you to Alex Thill and Local 21 CBS News, WHP Harrisburg for helping bring this urgent regional and national story into view.

Check out the short news piece at: https://local21news.com/news/local/rest-in-ruins-the-push-for-permanent-fixes-at-neglected-cemeteries

You can explore and support SOAL’s work at: https://linktr.ee/savingourancestorslegacy

09/23/2026

How can a historic Black cemetery with people still buried there simply be sold? The truth is the legal landscape does not provide any clear protection for preserving all, or even most, Black cemeteries.

09/23/2026

In NYC community leaders are trying to block the sale of the historic Black cemetery in Elmhurst, Queens county, NY where “the woman in the iron mask” was found in 2011, and hundreds of ancestors remain buried under the junk and parking lot. Perhaps a dozen more people were removed from the burial grounds by Chrysalis Archeology over 5 years ago and they haven’t returned them or issued a public reporting on the work since those dis-interments. Now the historic graveyard, sometimes referred to as St. Marks AME Church cemetery is scheduled to go up for a foreclosure auction in one month.

09/20/2026

Her Royal Majesty Queen Angelique- Monet just shared SOAL’s post and Rachael Keri Williams’ video of this most auspicious visit, with a special message. The Queen writes:

“A heartfelt thank you to Rachael Keri Williams and Saving Our Ancestors Legacy (SOAL) for your extraordinary dedication to preserving Lincoln Cemetery and recovering the histories of the families connected to it.

I am deeply grateful for the time, research, care and knowledge Rachael shared with me as we searched for my ancestors and explored new connections within my family history.

The work of SOAL reaches far beyond the preservation of a cemetery. It helps restore names, stories, dignity and connection for generations of descendants.

Thank you, Rachael, for helping bring these histories back to life. There is much more to come.

Her Royal Majesty Queen Angelique- Monet, The Queen of Eti-Oni, Osun State, U.S. Mission Nigeria, Hrm Oba Dokun Thompson

https://www.facebook.com/61557570928810/posts/122273699426252364/?mibextid=wwXIfr

09/20/2026

At SOAL, preservation is more than restoring and repairing stones. Preservation is also recovering names, reconnecting families, listening to elders, sharing photographs, caring for sacred burial grounds—and remaining open to the unexpected ways memory returns.

Restoration can sound like a shovel on sand and stone. Sometimes it sounds like a descendant calling an ancestor by name. And sometimes, completely unexpectedly, the cemetery sings.

We come here to recover what was buried, to reconnect what was scattered, and restore relationships that history tried to sever.

Today is Sunday, Day 3 of SOAL Restoration Weekend: September 18-20, 2026

Join us on-site, 12pm til dusk at the Historic Lincoln Cemetery • 201 S. 30th Street, Harrisburg, PA, 17103

Address

201 S 30th Street
Harrisburg, PA
17103

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