The annual Raleigh City Cemetery Labor Day tour in 2015 was conducted by Betsy Shaw, a local historian who led tours in City Cemetery for many years before she retired from doing this event. Betsy was fluent in the local history of our founding fathers as well as a researcher of African-Americans interred in the cemetery’s enslaved section. Known as an informed historian and witty storyteller, Betsy’s tours were popular and well-attended yearly, including those followers who came back to hear her cemetery talks more than once.

Betsy was instrumental in preserving history of City Cemetery, including calling attention to the broken grave markers for William Peace and family, and leading a campaign to mark the once unmarked grave of Anna Julia Cooper, a historian and scholar who was born to an enslaved mother in Raleigh and is interred in City Cemetery. She and her family members recorded hundreds of names, birth and death dates and inscriptions on index cards that later became the Shaw-Blunt database.