Cemeteries
If you are an avid Genealogist, you have spent time in a cemetery. For those of you who haven’t you have missed one of the more reliable sources of information for your older ancestors. Also, for no other reason, you should record the graves and locations, because cemetery stones do wear out and do fade over time and most methods of tracing an older stone do more damage to the stone. Tracking the dates and times in each cemetery can also help you design a timeline of your ancestors and also a geographic timeline of where they lived.
Most of my ancestors in America lived in Pennsylvania. Depending on the line and the time periods in question, they can be tracked from the areas around Philadelphia, clear to the shores of the Allegheny River. Along the way, each line made periodic stops and settled for whatever reasons yet to be determined. I call this affect of moving in leaps as groups Podding.
I started my research with my immediate grandparents, who are buried in two cemeteries here in the Youngstown, Ohio area. This created the starting spot of map point number one, Eastern Ohio. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was from Indiana County, Pennsylvania and my Grandmother was from Fayette County, Pennsylvania; giving me map points two and three.
On dad’s side, his father and mother were both from Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, but they lived in two different townships. This added five more cemeteries to the mix. Two for his father’s people, and three for his mother’s people, or so I thought. What I found out later was that his mother’s people were originally settled in Indiana County and that some of them were buried in the same cemeteries with my mother’s father’s side of the family. They lived across the road from each other three generations past and neither of the living families knew it.
My Favorite Cemetery Story……
When I was researching in Pennsylvania on my 1985 trip, I visited Uniontown Cemetery which sits just outside a small town called Cherry Tree, in Indiana County. I was walking through the cemetery looking for my mother’s great grandparents head stone, when I tripped on a ground stone that had sunk just enough to make it a hazard. I looked down to see the offending stone and it turned out to be the stone of one of my father’s great uncles on his mother’s side. At this point, I wasn’t even aware that his people were even in that area. In the next row, I found a stone for his Great Great Grandparents sitting right next to the original stone I was searching for on my mother’s side. Talk about Eureka and Holy Cow!
Anyway, I now had eight cemeteries on the list with yet more to come. I started gathering obituaries and they led me to even more cemeteries and eventually to McDowell that is the picture above.
Now, how do I record a cemetery. Row by row either front to back or left to right. Personally, I take general pictures, but I know some researchers who have taken stone by stone pictures. One of those researchers happens to be a distant cousin named Kenneth Stallard who has done a massive fantastic effort on the Beaver Valley Cemetery in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. I have never seen a more complete and well done transcription of a cemetery with lots of extras. My only concern is that it is hosted on Rootsweb which is controlled by Ancestry.com. (More about Ancestry.com in a later article.)
I then take my hand written transcription and place it in an Access Database, that I designed specifically for the purpose. This allows me to search by name, by row, and by location as each grave is numbered. Where possible I note a relationship of the person, such as a spouse or parent and I also list the parents of the individual if known. In the case of McDowell, I have also noted if the person is in my general database, which most of them are and that gives me a cross reference.
For those of your who are curious how long it took two people to transcribe a cemetery with over 2000 graves….it took about 20 visits over a six month time period including in winter, when it was possible to get there in between snows. The hills of Pennsylvania are fantastically beautiful in the winter, if you can drive them. To me, visiting cemeteries even in winter, is a glorious part of the quest. Don’t let those blizzards stop you! Just dress warm!
There is an etiquette for searching in a cemetery. I will cover that in another article.
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