清扫工变身抖音明星

Caitlin 艾布拉姆斯’08 has always enjoyed visiting old cemeteries. 多亏了视频平台TikTok, she’s able to share her passion for historic cemeteries with the world. 狂躁的小精灵妈妈， she posts videos where she talks about the lives (and often untimely deaths) of those buried under the 18th- and 19th-century gravestones she cleans. Her short videos rack up tens to hundreds of thousands of views from her 1.800万粉丝.

在新英格兰出生和长大, 艾布拉姆斯 moved to Vermont in 2014 and soon developed the habit of visiting local cemeteries in her free time. She spent a few years researching the deceased and sharing gravestone symbolism knowledge with a few Facebook friends and Instagram followers — a process she says “lit up every part of my brain.”

在大流行的最初几个月, 艾布拉姆斯 became a volunteer for Find A Grave, a public database owned by Ancestry.com that allows users anywhere in the country to search for gravestone photos. An Iowa woman requested photos of her relative’s grave in Vermont, but 艾布拉姆斯 found the stone covered in lichen and almost illegible. She spent the next several months learning how to clean the stone without harming it or the environment, 得到墓地的许可. She learned that spraying the stones with D2, 一种无毒的杀菌剂, reveals their original state and color.

She published her first few grave-cleaning videos in 2020, 但是在工作和照顾孩子之间, couldn’t dedicate much time to it until this past summer. The TikTok videos took off, in spite of her initial hesitation to use the platform.

艾布拉姆斯, who has taught software programs to companies and universities since graduating from 贝洛伊特, 让步了.

“I’m 35 and I really didn’t want to invade the space of the youths and their dancing and fun,她说。. “然后我就想，为什么不呢? I think I can speak well and I know how to teach. It felt a lot 更多的 natural to me than Instagram, where I was constantly trying to frantically type out this story. 如果我能说话就容易多了. I found that TikTok was the perfect medium for it.”

A Russian language major and journalism minor, 艾布拉姆斯’ gift for oratory was evident in and out of the classroom. Her fascination with Russian language, 文化, and 历史 — and her Russian “mom” and professor Olga Ogurtsova — convinced her to study abroad there, even as the country was in an economic depression and her future husband was fighting in Iraq.

“I think that the experience studying abroad in Moscow was very formative in learning that you’re not as worldly as you think you are when you’re 21,艾布拉姆斯解释道. “We were pretty much on our own for food, where we were going to go, what we were going to do.”

What were the top sites on her list? 不足为奇的是, the resting place of Vladimir Lenin in Red Square and Novodevichy Cemetery, where thousands of famous Russians were buried, from former Premier Nikita Khrushchev to playwright Anton Chekhov. She laughs as she remembers visiting Stalin’s wife’s grave, which read something like, “To a member of the Communist party, from Stalin.”

毕业15年后, 艾布拉姆斯 has kept up with the language and hopes to visit Russia again someday — when she isn’t juggling her current full-time job with her TikTok side hustle and motherhood. For now, she’s just excited to continue making others excited about 历史.

“I’m going to keep sharing this stuff, even if it’s only three people looking at it,她说。. “It’s a real passion project for me and something that I feel really strongly about — bringing 历史 to life in a way that people haven’t experienced. I really like that I’m hitting younger people now because I think it’s important for [them] to start taking up this mantle of maintaining, 检查, 了解我们的历史. 我想这会有所帮助.”