Originally Posted By: wayne50
I have used the site and it is great. I had a question for Pop_Rivit though. For a few of my ancestors, Find a Grave shows them buried at a specific cemetery, but when I went there, not all headstones could be found. My question is, "Do you have access to other cemetery records to put on the website other than just reading the headstone info?
Thanks
Sometimes.
When we contract with a city or township to do the cemetery, we ask for all of the records available for that cemetery. On some older cemeteries there are no paper records, on a couple it has been a bunch of paper records thrown together in a box, and on some the information is somewhat organized.
Once we have all of the paper records that exist, we organize and walk the cemetery with them and note any discrepancies. We also look for any grave markers that have been moved and try to match them up with the correct location and reset them (one cemetery had half a dozen civil war era markers leaning up against a tree). We combine what's on the headstone with any paper information we have.
After we create a map that is as accurate as possible with the information we have, it gets entered into the application that I wrote-the application allows the city/township clerk to add and lookup information, produce a map of the cemetery that shows unsold, sold (unoccupied) and occupied plots, and create deeds for unsold plots, print out lists, etc. Various organizations and interested people can then use the data to put on the website, along with photographs they take of the headstones.
In your case I would suggest contacting the managing entity for the cemetery and inquiring with them about the data they have available. It's not uncommon for grave markers to get misplaced or moved, or the existing records to indicate that someone is buried in cemetery A when they are actually buried in cemetery B. We've found that, especially in minimally managed cemeteries, the records can be very misleading and inaccurate. Also, when you go to the cemetery, look around for grave markers set up against trees, fence lines, etc. Especially with the older civil war era tombstones, it's common for them to fall over from frost heave or break. They then seem to get tossed in a pile somewhere in the cemetery in hopes that someone will someday fix it.
It can also be extremely difficult to read some of the older tombstones-we had to do quite a few rubbings in order to match the tombstone to a name. The soft stone they often used in the 19th century weathers very poorly.
