01945 Winter 2021 11-12-21_Reduced

A legacy
Winter 2021 | 37
etched in
stone
Photos and story by Alena Kuzub
For at least three generations,
the first sons in the Cedrone
family have been named
Daniel Joseph and one after
the other they took up the art
of stone engraving.
“I think most people that do this work,
that are engravers, learn it from their fathers
or their family,” said Daniel Joseph Cedrone
III, current owner of Marblehead Memorials.
“And I think there are probably just a
few families in Massachusetts that do this,
and it is passed down to the sons, most
likely.”
Cedrone never met his grandfather,
who did engraving as a full-time career. His
grandfather never owned his own monument
company, but he ran a crew that did
engraving for other monument dealers.
Cedrone assumes that his grandfather didn’t
choose this profession by accident. He believes
his great-grandfather, who came from
Italy, was involved in memorial services
there as well.
His father, Daniel Joseph Cedrone Jr.,
did engraving part-time. His full-time job
was at General Electric in Lynn, but he
started Marblehead Memorials on the side.
“I took this business over from my father,
learned the trade from him,” said Cedrone.
Cedrone started working with his father
when he was about 10 years old.
“Whenever he was going to work
engraving, I would try to go with him,” said
Cedrone. “I was always interested. I just like
being with my dad and hanging out with
him and talking to him and working with
him. I always liked being out for the day, just
driving around, watching him do his thing.”
Once Cedrone overslept and, when he
woke up, he heard his father leaving. Cedrone
hurried and ran after his truck, but his
father did not notice him.
“I wanted to be with him for the day, but
he didn’t see me, so I walked back home,”
Cedrone said.
Cedrone said that his father, “Handsome
Big Dan” or HBD, as he called himself, was
very patient, funny, smart, and well-liked.
He took the time to train Cedrone, to show
him how to do everything from sandblasting
to hand tooling intricate details with a
hammer and a chisel.
When his father died in 2018 at the age
of 74, Cedrone knew exactly what headstone
he would choose for him — light-gray granite
from Barre, Vt., all finished and smooth
on all sides. Then Cedrone read a letter
that his father had left for him. His father
described in the letter the exact same design
of the headstone he wanted for himself.
Now Cedrone is the owner and only employee
of Marblehead Memorials. He does
it as a part-time job, as a hobby, he said. He
sells headstones, does freelance engraving
for other companies, and offers monument
cleaning and restoration services.
“It’s not really glamorous. We are out
there sandblasting all day. We come home
filthy. And it’s hard, manual labor. It’s a lot
of lugging bags of sand and hauling hose.
But I’ve always loved it. That’s why I keep
doing it even as a part-time job. It’s something
I think I’ll always do,” said Cedrone.
Cedrone likes the artistic aspect of this
job. He finds it satisfying to look at the final
product. He said he takes pride when the
finished product looks great.
On average, Cedrone sells 40 headstones
a year and does hundreds of engravings. This
year was busier than most, Cedrone said.
“Kind of playing catch up from last year,”
he said.
Engraving takes from half an hour
for one date to several hours for several
lines. When he started, he had to lay out
every symbol with proper distances on a
flat surface by hand. Nowadays, the job is
designed in the Computer-Aided Design
(CAD) software and printed on a rubber
stencil, which gets glued to the stone and
then sandblasted.
Business comes mostly through the word
of mouth, Cedrone said. Some clients come
knowing exactly what they want. Others
he takes around a cemetery to look at the
headstones.
“You take something from one stone,
you take something from another, and
that’s how you arrive at your stone, which is
unique and special,” Cedrone said.
Besides monuments and headstones,
Cedrone does landscape boulders, which
are quite popular on Cape Cod, where he’s
had a lot of clients. Some people ask to put
Marblehead Memorials owner Daniel Joseph Cedrone III carries on a family stone-engraving tradition stretching back more than a century to Italy.