Taken to the Grave
By Christy Carley
Photos by Dinah Satterwhite
“That’s polished granite underneath that,” said Ashely Riley, pointing to a weathered gray headstone at Kane Cemetery near Port Madison. The darker hue and rough texture is a familiar sight in cemeteries, almost archetypal. But when Riley looks at it, she sees a project.
Using a non-toxic chemical called D/2—developed by historical preservationists—Riley can restore the stone to its original glowing white.
“There are some people who don’t want gravestones to be cleaned because they like the patina look,” Riley said. But without cleaning, the stones can eventually be damaged and rendered illegible.
Founder of the Facebook page Bainbridge Grave Folk, Riley has spent the last three years cataloging, cleaning and researching graves in Bainbridge’s five cemeteries. She’s added more than 1,600 memorials to the website Find a Grave and has already cleaned more than 100 stones on the island. Her project began spontaneously, before she became an islander.
In 2022, Riley and her family were living in Port Orchard. She enrolled her son in preschool at Halilts and commuted to the island in the morning, hanging around until his class got out.
“I could have gone to Starbucks and just done whatever on my phone,” she said. But instead, she wandered over to Kane Cemetery.
Riley had previously visited the website Find a Grave while trying to locate her own ancestors’ graves on the East Coast. The site lets users enter the location of a grave along with photos and biographical information about the deceased. When Riley couldn’t find her family’s gravesites, she created profiles for them and enlisted the help of other users to determine their exact locations. While wandering around Kane Cemetery, Riley noticed that very few of the graves had profiles on Find a Grave. So, one by one, she started creating them.
“Then it became like, ‘I’m going to finish this cemetery,’ then, ‘I’m going to finish every cemetery on the island,’” she said. Halfway through her son’s first year of preschool, she completed her work on Bainbridge and began cataloging graves in Suquamish.
By the time Riley and her family moved to Bainbridge in March 2024, she had transitioned from documenting gravestones to cleaning them, with historical preservation at the front of her mind.
“Looking through a historical lens, these are markers of a town that’s long gone. Port Madison (Mill Town) is long gone, Port Blakely Mill Town is long gone,” Riley said.
Riley uses her Facebook page to share photos, information and stories about islanders who played a prominent role in Bainbridge history. When she can find them, she also tells the stories of everyday people, such as Laura Sutton, who came to Bainbridge after she learned she was dying of tuberculosis.
“She had always wanted to come to the Pacific Northwest,” Riley said. “She died within a few months of moving here and her husband wrote this beautiful obituary saying that what she found in the Pacific Northwest was like a family.” Sutton’s grave is marked with a carved wooden plaque at Island Center Cemetery.
Riley generally sticks to researching graves for people who died before 1950.
For more recent deaths, she wants to give families space. Her conversations with visitors to the cemeteries have been overwhelmingly positive. The only negative feedback she’s gotten was an email from a stranger calling her a “graveyard gossiper and obituary opportunist.” The comment stung, but she now uses it as her tagline.
Riley doesn’t often get spooked while working in cemeteries. In fact, she said the experience is meditative. But she has started to reflect more on death and dying.
“About halfway through my son’s first year of preschool, I miscarried,” Riley said. “While I knew I was miscarrying, I was still going to cemeteries and taking pictures. We had to confront death at the same time that I was documenting people’s deaths.”
Riley chose to have her daughter cremated. It didn’t make sense to bury her, at the time, because the family wasn’t sure where they would settle. Now, Riley can’t imagine living anywhere but Bainbridge.
“When I’m old and I’m dying, do not send me to Seattle to die. I want to die on this island. And I want on my death certificate that I died on Bainbridge Island.”
As for her own final resting place, is there a particular island cemetery she has in mind?
“I’m a millennial,” she said, laughing. “I want my ashes thrown off the ferry.
