My Tombstone Collection: April 2009

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Tombstone Tuesday and Find-A-Grave

At the suggestion of a Genealogy Blogger, Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings this Blog will provide a way for me to keep track of what Tombstone's that I have posted here and which ones I have posted to Find-A-Grave.

Over the years, I have several hundred photographs, taken with a digital camera and are in my files. I started the project of taking digital photos to record information for my wife for her ancestors. I created a website for her and posted the pictures here. http://home.comcast.net/~russ.worthington/patti/ There are 10 cemeteries posted there. Not sure how many photos are there, but that will be a piece of my current project. That is, tracking what has been posted and where.

That was before Blogging and our cemetery visits have been reduced as we have most of the photos we wanted.

The Genealogy Blogging Community, in http://www.geneabloggers.com/ and on Facebook challenged us to use our Blogs to share our photographs of Tombstone's and stories on Tuesday. There is a Logo to the right of this message about The Grave Yard Rabbits Association that is another group of researchers who share their research.

For some time, Find-A-Grave has been "out there" doing a similar project. That is getting photographs of tombstones Online.

So, how I have too many places to "put stuff". Oh, did mention that I want these photo's to show up in my genealogy software.

Another challenge to the Genealogy Blogging Community was to get organized in 2009 and there is a monthly reminder to Back Up your files. These two challenges reminded me that I had about 200 3.5 Floppy Disks (remember them) that need to get these photos on CD's or other media. How many PC's have Floppy Drives today.

Off to my local office supply store for a USB Floppy Drive. Then spent a number of hours copying the files from the Floppies to my Hard Drive. Of the 75 floppies done so far, 3 are reported bad, but haven't given up on them yet.

In the midst of this, Find-A-Grave sent me an email requesting that I take a couple of photos at the request of a Find-A-Grave reader. Almost, Genealogy Over Load. In fulfilling that photo request, I remembered (re-descovered) that Find-A-Grave had a tool for us to use. It's an EXCEL spread sheet that can be downloaded, the submitted when complete. It can be found on the Find A Grave Spreadsheet Template website. The answer to the the Genealogy Over Load is there for me.

I have created a spreadsheet, based from that Template, for each cemetery that I have. Filling out the information on that spreadsheet with the information from the photographs on my computer, printing that form, will show me information that needs to be filled in from my Genealogy software. For printing purposes, the EXCEL file name and Cemetery Name are included in the Header of the spreadsheet. Since this is a spreadsheet, three columns were added. Tombstone Tuesday, Find-A-Grave, and my genealogy software.

Once this spreadsheet is printed, filling in the blanks from my geneal0gy software. The blanks being the full name, birth and death dates, Plot information, Inscription, and notes are filled in.

Since the use of TAGs, in this Blog will help identify what has ready been posted, a review of each cemetery will be easy to check off. Find-A-Grave provides the list of photos that have been posted, another blank will be filled in. After the online work is done, then inserting the photos in my genealogy program will complete this organizing.

All of the tombstone photos are filed together in one folder on my computer. The file naming that was chosen is:

State-County-Cemetery-SurnameForenameMiddlename.jpg

The EXCEL files are also saved in this folder on the computer.

The list of what has been complete and another "To Do List" is generated, but organized.

This is a work in progress, at this point, but it's working so far.

Note: there will be an Edited version of the EXCEL file will be used to upload to Find-A-Grave, removing the information in the file that is not needed by Find-A-Grave.

Questions, Comments, or Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.