Team

Cemetery Tales is a team of one: Darren Phaneuf.

Darren’s journey through the corridors of history began in the rolling farmland of upstate New York—a landscape steeped in heritage that sparked his fascination with the past. From an early age, he found comfort and inspiration in historical literature, immersing himself in tales of courage and valor such as Margaret Cousins’ We Were There at the Battle of the Alamo and G.A. Henty’s With Lee in Virginia. Films like Northwest Passage starring Spencer Tracy and Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier featuring Fess Parker further fueled his curiosity. Though often melodramatic and historically skewed, these early encounters with the past lit the fire that continues to drive his passion today.

That passion deepened during his academic years at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where he studied under historians Altina Waller, James Lindgren, Anita Rapone, and others. In 1994, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholar grant under Waller’s guidance, he investigated the socioeconomic impact of the Civil War on a small New York city—a project that earned him Phi Alpha Theta’s Best Paper Prize in 1995. For his senior thesis, Darren examined ethnic conflict among mill workers competing for employment, exploring the intersections of labor, identity, and masculinity. That research was later published in Susan Ouellette’s 2005 anthology Conflict and Accommodation in North Country Communities, 1850–1930.

Darren continued his studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was named a Phi Kappa Phi Fellow and received Phi Alpha Theta’s Zimmerman Scholarship. His research included a project on French-Canadian immigration (guided by Mary Blewett) and another on colonial Native American captives, including his own sixth great-grandfather, Mathias Farnsworth (overseen by Miriam Chrisman). He presented his work at venues including the New York State History Conference and the Cultural Identity in French America Conference in Bar Harbor, Maine.

For 25 years, Darren worked as a technical project manager, but his dedication to historical research never waned. Summers were spent exploring historical sites in 45 states with his children, while his cycling adventures took him along America’s backroads, where he encountered forgotten cemeteries, bridges, and homes. These experiences nurtured the seeds of an idea that would become Cemetery Tales—a project devoted to resurrecting the stories of ordinary people, ensuring their legacies endure long after the last living memory of them fades.