Townie Tuesday by Gillian Swart: Ghlee Woodworth

Ghlee Woodworth is 12^th generation Newburyport. She went away for a while, to college and to see the world as a volunteer with the Peace Corps, but when she was done seeing all she wanted to see, she returned home.

“”I left after high school,” she explains. “I went to college and graduate school and then followed my dream to see the world.” (by 2004) “I was tired, had done a lot of traveling and did my thing.”

Now her thing is picking up where her father, amateur historian Todd Woodworth, left off when he passed away in 2006.

”My father loved history,” she says. ”He was very well known, very well liked.”

Todd Woodworth was a funeral director who gathered facts and also loved research. When writer Liam Sullivan (who was looking here for the grave of a famous photographer) in 1988 suggested he should do cemetery tours, the elder Woodworth didn’t think much of the idea at first.

But his “Tiptoe through the Tombstones” tours caught on right away and when the daughter took over from her father in 2006, she expanded the tour to include not just Oak Hill Cemetery but also Old Hill Burying Ground and New Hill Burying Ground (aka Highland Cemetery).

In December 2007, she decided to put a book together about Oak Hill Cemetery and 70 selected people buried there in the 1800s.

Entitled “Tiptoe through the Tombstones: Oak Hill Cemetery,” it is, or will be, just volume 1 of a series. She hopes to have it out by Yankee Homecoming (held the last week of July), a time when her tours really take off.

In the meantime, she is fielding requests from all over the country, including a professor from Loyola University who is researching stone cutters, and people looking for relative and the like. She’s also researching her next book, which will skip Oak Hill for the time being and will be on Old Hill and Highland cemeteries.

She is also working on a tour about African-Americans in Newburyport in the 1800s.

“Writers, poets, silversmiths, merchants, photographers, soldiers, politicians, sea captains” these are just a few of the people whose graves tell a story about Newburyport.