Efforts are underway to create an online database with an interactive map of suffragists’ gravesites across New York State. The idea comes from Linda Moroney, who runs a independent film production company with her husband, Todd McCammon. She produced “Election Day 2016,” filmed at the gravesite of Susan B. Anthony in Rochester’s Mt. Hope Cemetery.
“We do know about Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and how prominent they were, but we also want to really look at this holistically and inclusively, and look for other people that may not have always been traditionally incorporated in this movement,” she said.
Moroney's working on a new documentary, in which filmmakers will go to suffragists’ gravesites statewide on Election Day this November and interview people visiting those sites with their “I Voted” stickers. She said it is a different way of understanding history and bringing it into the modern day.
“It’s a way of looking at history and understanding history and not thinking of it as just something within our textbooks, but by going to these different sites on Election Day, things come very much alive, and connects modern-day voters with this past, and brings it to life,” she said.
Moroney said people can help build the database by going to womenandthevotenys.com if they know of, or are related to, an individual who had an active role in the suffragist movement. Several “Suffragist Search Parties” are also planned, including one at the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House on Feb. 22.
She said the initiative, which looks at the suffrage movement from a wide point of view, coincides with the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which allowed women to vote.
