Monday, February 16, 2009

The Grave Yard Rabbit Association and Find A Grave

Have you considered expanding your time, energy, and talent at The Grave Yard Rabbit Association to the Find A Grave website: http://www.findagrave.com



I am new to blogging, not new to genealogy, new to the Grave Yard Rabbit Association, not new to putting Headstone photographs online. With the encouragement found on Facebook and Geneabloggers I started to participate in the Tombstone Tuesday event. That lead to the Grave Yard Rabbit Association. It appeared to me that Family Historians have a number of research tools that are used for their gathering of stories.




Early in my research my wife and I found ourselves walking through cemeteries. I always carry a camera through these adventures so taking pictures of headstones and using these photographs for entering data into my family file. It was much easier, for me, to use a photograph then trying to write down what was on the headstone.

After gathering a couple of hundred photographs, I created a website for my wife’s cemeteries. A year or so later, she received an email from someone who found a headstone, on her website, and wanted to know more about that family. To make a long story short, it turned out that this contact was a cousin, whose grandfather was the brother of my wife’s grandmother. The brother and sister had a parting of ways many years ago and claimed that they were the last of the family.



Having these headstones online made for an interesting story and a reunion of two families that didn’t know the other existed.




Find A Grave has been around for a while, as I found a family that I was researching for a friend. Didn’t know much about the family and the friend was not ‘into genealogy’. As it turned out, the specific cemetery was close, I drove to the cemetery and found a very large family blot. It appeared to be about a 5 generation blot, from my initial visit.




As was my tradition, I took pictures everyone in the Plot and entered the data that the pictures provided into the new family file. Then started to do research on that family for this friend.




So, I am now completing the circle from Find A Grave to The Grave Yard Rabbit Association back to Find A Grave.




I have a Blog [
http://headstonecollection.blogspot.com/ ] and as I post the pictures there, I am now adding these headstones to Find A Grave. It doesn’t take but a couple of minutes to create a Find A Grave account and adding pictures and information there.



Won’t you join me?

No comments:

Post a Comment