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After more than 40 years of studying gravestones, he continues to make new findings. "One thing that has surprised me is that in historic New England cemeteries, among the descendants of the Puritans and the pilgrims, there are former slaves and free black people buried here and there. And most of their gravestones—at least in this area—are just like the gravestones for their white neighbors. We never knew they were there. And we're starting to recognize and acknowledge them. When I mention this to other people who are just getting interested in old cemeteries it kind of takes them by surprise too. Because if you just look at the stones you don't know who these people are."Bob found this out through the work of the town engineer James A. Smith, who happened to be a genealogist. He had been given the assignment of looking into the cemetery's history in order to find out if there were any available plots. Since then, additional research was done by former physics Professor Bob Romer, who showed that slavery was actually pervasive in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts. "His book came as a shocker to a lot of people who were conditioned to think that slavery and that sort of thing was something that happened south of the Mason Dixon line, which is hardly the case. There's a lot of history that's been conveniently forgotten.""Cemeteries are living history museums. You can walk through that gate at any moment in time and be transported back to two, three, in some cases four hundred years."