Norway – Maine Cemeteries: Lives Cut Short with Ron Roman

Please join Portland native, historian, and author Ron Romano as he presents Maine Cemeteries: Lives Cut Short on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at 6:30 pm at Norway Memorial Library. He will show how gravestones from the 1800s were inscribed and decorated with symbols to memorialize those who died before their time, and he’ll share stories of Mainers whose lives were cut short by lightning, shipwreck, disease…even murder.

Romano is a cemetery historian recognized as one of Maine’s leading researchers of its nineteenth-century gravestones, symbolism, monument makers, and burial landscapes. He has written several books and multiple papers on these subjects. Ron has designed walking tours of twenty historic cemeteries. He offers classes in gravestone symbols, family tree research, and related topics through Adult Ed and speakers’ programs at public libraries and historical societies throughout Maine. He’s served on local and national nonprofit boards for organizations dedicated to preserving grave markers and cemetery landscapes, including the Association for Gravestone Studies. He is the winner of the Forbes Award, the highest honor bestowed by this association. Ron has been a guest on Maine Public Radio’s Maine Calling this summer. The book was favorably reviewed by The Bollard newspaper and in Troy Bennett’s History Jig Substack earlier this month, and it is currently a best-seller at Longfellow Books in Portland.

Norway Memorial Library is located at 258 Main Street, Norway, Maine. Copies of the book will be available for sale and for autographing the night of the event for a book tour price of $20. For more information, please call the library at 743-5309 or visit www.norwaymemoriallibrary.org.