Grave hunting--Part Deux

Adding graves to the registry.

What started out to fulfill a few request of folks around the country in getting pictures of their ancestor's grave markers into the Find A Grave data base has morphed into taking on trying to get a whole cemetery entered.

After going to Chapel Hill Cemetery a few days I was able to learn my way around to make it fairly easy to find the graves. The office was very helpful in looking up the locations for me and I learned that, by following their great maps, it was easy to go to the correct location with ease. This cemetery is not only laid out well, each year, they produce a book with the listing of everyone buried there with the section, block and lot numbers. But, after a couple of days I had all the request for pictures from the Find A Grave site completed. Also after a few days of going in with a list of graves for them to look up for me I was able to talk them out of one of their books. Now I don't even have to stop at the office.

Going through their book I learned that there are over 14,000 graves in this cemetery. Looking at the statistics on Find A Grave, less than half of these have been documented on that site. I have now taken on the effort to get as many of the missing one entered and documented. Each evening I take a section of their book and run it against the listing in Find A Grave for Chapel Hill. I make a list of all the ones that are not already on the site. (Both the book and the FAG site are listed alphabetically.) Making a list of the ones not on the FAG site I record about 30 to 40 each evening. The next day, and I've been doing this pretty much everyday for the past two weeks, I go out to the cemetery and locate each grave on my list. I take a picture of the marker and record any information on the marker, including dates of birth and death. That evening I upload the pictures to the appropriate individual memorial page I had entered the previous evening, along with whatever information I've been able to get from the grave marker. Then I take another page or two from the book and do another list for the next day. So far I've been able to add around 300 new entries to the FAG site. What is interesting is that most of the ones I am documenting are older graves. Most of these folks were born in the late 1800's or early 1900's, including several World War I veterans. Most of the newer burials are in that half that have already been entered in FAG data base.

This is being done for several reasons. One, it works with my enjoyment of working on the computer. Another is it gets me out of the house everyday and causes me to do a bunch of walking since this is a very large cemetery. Finally, I feel good about getting these graves listed in the FAG data base so that someone seeking out info on their ancestors may be helped in their search. That last reason has already come to fruition. In the past couple of days I've received messages from a couple of different people about the graves I've documented. One I got yesterday was from a guy from Texas who has been attempting to find his ancestors in a couple of states. One I entered was a distant cousin that his family had been seeking information on. That family finally knows where their cousin wound up and has some information to try to attempt to find out what happened to him and where he had been during the years after he left home. I was warned by some other FAG "Graver's" that this can become addictive when I first started. I'm finding that this is possibly very true. I've already got a list of 41 to go find on Monday.