I'm getting tired of titles...so I'll just call this: 4/23/12

Yesterday I made a trip to some of my favorite cemeteries; Galena, Sunbury Memorial and Trenton. I also managed to drive all the way up to Stark Cemetery. I had a photo request for the headstone of a little girl named Phoebe. She died in 1855 at the age of 13. After doing a little research, I found that her parents were buried in Iowa. Her sisters, Almeda (d. 1853 aged 1 year), Frances (d. 1855 aged 6 months) and Emma (d. 1860 aged 2 months) are also buried in Stark cemetery. I can't imagine how it must have felt to have 4 daughters die at such young ages. I'm not sure why, but there was only a photo request for Phoebe.  Almeda was listed on FindAGrave, but Frances and Emma were not. Maybe the person requesting the photo didn't even know about the others. Phoebe was probably the only one who showed up on a census record. I know they are all siblings because the headstones all say: dau. of Z.P. and M. H. (Zachariah and Margaret).

I am always a little sad to visit this cemetery. The local kids hang out here, you can tell from all the beer bottles and graffiti. There are already a lot of broken headstones and it is not well taken care of.



I know I said I don't like going to cemeteries in Licking County because I don't have the transcription logs for any of them, but I was so close-by yesterday, and the photo requests had been out there for a long time.
The first of the cemeteries I visited was called Patterson Cemetery. I wasn't worried about having to walk row-by-row as there were only about 50 graves. I had never been to this cemetery before and was a little surprised to see that it was a field with 20 or so markers. The headstones were spaced very far apart, making me think there are a lot of graves with no headstones. I couldn't find Rebecca, the one I was looking for. When I got home I did a little more research on this one only to find out that I was in the wrong Patterson Cemetery. There are 3 cemeteries in this county with the same name. Apparently I was not the only one to get them confused. I found the same people listed in each cemetery. I was lucky enough to find a cemetery transcription on-line for the largest of the 3 cemeteries and learned that this was the cemetery Rebecca was buried in, not the one I had been sent to; and there was already a photo attached to her memorial. So I sent a message out to get the duplicate memorials listed in the right cemetery or deleted.

The next cemetery was a smaller, but very old, cemetery at the back of a small neighborhood in Johnstown. Again, I had no transcript for this one, but with a little luck and intuition I found it on the first try! As I was walking in I happened to look at the Veteran's Memorial plaque at the base of the flag pole and saw the name of the man I was looking for; Abel Jewett. Once I knew he was a veteran I decided to just target the headstones with flags. I wasn't sure this would work, but if it did it would save a lot time. Sure enough, the first headstone I looked at belonged to Abel. It was leaning forward quite a bit so getting a good picture was difficult.

Finally I visited Tuller Cemetery. Yet again, no transcription log. I was worried because I had been here before and knew that many of the headstones were too worn to be easily read. Then a thought struck. Look for a big marker with the last name; go to that section and look for Moses' wife, Sharloty. Usually I try to very methodical about looking for headstones, but something told me to just look for a big marker. So I did and found her headstone a few feet away from her husband's.

All done; 2 counties, 7 cemeteries, 6 photo requests, 23 photos needed but not requested, 10 found mistakes, in under 3 hours. Not a bad day (except for the 25 mph winds.)

I'm back!

You might think that I haven't been posting anything because I wasn't able to get out in the bad weather this winter. Well, that's not the case. There was no bad weather! I think we had about 4 days of snow. I was actually able to get out and take photos quite a bit. One thing that helped was that my husband started working from home. I could get out for 1 or 2 hours several days a week instead of having to wait for my "day-off", hope the weather was good and make a big trip of it. So I have been taking pictures, but I just didn't get around to blogging about it.

Green Lawn front gate on a foggy day.

I have also been working on several cemetery related projects. The first was a for a guy out west named Devon. He saw on FindAGrave that I had posted several pictures for some of his relatives. He was planning a trip to Columbus in the spring and wanted to visit his ancestors at Green Lawn. He was asking for advise and contact information so he could do as much research prior to his visit as possible. I hated telling him that to get the information from the cemetery office is costly ($3.00 per name); since he was looking for about 35 names. The alternative is to go through all the microfilm at the Metropolitan Library downtown. I offered to do this for him if he would send me the names and as much information as he could. He was so happy! I was able to find the majority of the names on his list and mailed him a packet including the death certificates, individual section maps of the cemetery, and a larger map of the whole cemetery. I'm not sure if he has been here yet, but I hope what I sent to him was enough to make his search easier. (The pictures of Green Lawn are from one of the trips I made to get maps for Devon)

Soldier's section.

Foggy day in October 2011.

The second project I have been working on is creating my own library of cemetery transcriptions. I made a list of all the cemeteries I visit and started looking for anything I could find about each one. I don't mind walking cemeteries row-by-row, but it's a lot faster if I have then headstone readings in hand! I found that many of the ones for Franklin and Delaware County cemeteries are available either on-line or at the Westerville, Sunbury or Delaware libraries. Licking County on the other hand is totally frustrating. Yes, most of the cemeteries were transcribed (back in the 1980's), but they were published in alphabetical order; not order of headstone placement. I can tell who is in the cemetery, but not where to find them, so I still have to walk row-by-row. Because of this I have been staying away from Licking County to some degree. This is unfortunate since there are a number of photo requests for Green Hill Cemetery in Johnstown. Anyway, I now have a 4 inch notebook with about 50 tab dividers holding all of the transcriptions that I have.