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A broken tombstone rests in the old section at Fairview Cemetery, 700 Yale Blvd. S.E. For the past five years, volunteers have been transcribing epitaphs from markers in local cemeteries like Fairview as part of a national effort to preserve history.

Rick Scibelli/Special to the Tribune

Members of the Tombstone Transcription Project meet regularly at the Albuquerque Special Collections Library to gather information that's available there on local cemeteries. That information, along with the members' own field work, is later put online.

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Of all the tombstones Sally Goehring has come across in her walks through New Mexico cemeteries, the one marking a homicide was the strangest.

"The man had been murdered, and it actually said on the tombstone something about `Murdered by,' and it gave the other man's name," recalls the Albuquerque resident. "Now, that was kind of weird."

The epitaph was one of many recorded by Goehring and other volunteers working on the Tombstone Transcription Project, a nationwide effort to catalog and publish online the sentences that memorialize the dead before time and the elements erase them.

Albuquerque resident Cheryl Harris coordinates the work being done in Bernalillo County, and she and her volunteers agree: The names, dates and sayings they collect from tombstones are more than just data.

"I think it's just something about connecting with our roots and our ancestors," Goehring says. "We all have to have some connection to the past to understand ourselves."

When Harris launched the group in 2001, she never expected to still be putting in five hours a day five years later.

So far, her team - which also does work outside Bernalillo County - has uploaded information about 27 burial sites to the Web. The details of 40 more sites await transfer from spiral-bound notebooks to the digital world.

With 655 burial sites around the state and more to be found - and with death's steady production of new epitaphs to be recorded - she says the work may never be done.

"I worry I will die and this will die with me," she says. "It's just a continual search for records."

That search often begins at a public library, where much information already exists about burial sites and who rests in them. After gathering what data they can, volunteers visit burial sites with pen and paper.

Some inscriptions, worn away, can be transferred only by laying a piece of paper atop them and rubbing a crayon over the letters, Goehring says, noting it's a measure rarely taken. Usually, a closer look or a bit of water can clarify the words.

Once a burial site has been logged, the volunteers return to the public library for more research.

This time, they're looking for newspaper articles, death certificates and anything else that can more deeply describe the person behind the name they've recorded.

"This is something that could be forever," Harris says.

It's also something that could be considered macabre, admits Goehring, who has been volunteering on the project since 2001.

"My son says that I'm a ghoul," she says. "I tell him, `No, I'm not a ghoul, I'm a historian.'"

Goehring, in her 70s, has collected 25 binders of information about her own family history. There are 4,000 pages of documents that need filing, she says.

Such familial details have become increasingly interesting to her children because of her involvement with the transcription project, she says.

"As they've gotten older, it has come to mean more to them," she says.

Besides piquing her kids' interest in their family history, the project has given Goehring chances to socialize and get out of the house.

At a recent meeting of the volunteers, she laughed along with Harris and four others as they recounted their discoveries of unusual tombstones.

There was one tombstone that read, "Here lies his leg." There's the "Mother of Billy the Kid" tombstone inscription of Katherine Antrim's burial site in Silver City. (A Web site dedicated to Billy the Kid trivia said Antrim's name was spelled with a "C," though the inscription is spelled with a "K.")

And what about the person with the first name of Orange? And remember the man named Valentino who was born on Feb. 14, 1914? And the first person to be killed by a car in Albuquerque?

"Sometimes, I suppose people think it's kind of strange," Goehring says. "We're actually kind of fun. You might find you enjoy it."