Preserve Your Local Cemetery

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cemeteries, Find-A-Grave

Visiting cemeteries is enjoyable to me…any cemetery, anywhere! I’ve been known to walk out of a restaurant and across a parking lot to explore a cemetery. If I’m driving out in the country, and I see an interesting, especially older cemetery, I’ll pull over to check it out.

So if you love cemeteries too, you might want to participate in an upcoming event called “Preserve Your Local Cemetery.”

Find-A-Grave is having a Global Cemetery Meet-up on Saturday, October 18. They want you to “Do your part for history,” and “Preserve your local cemetery.”

Basically you just visit a cemetery, take some photos (or videos), fulfill a photo request from Find-A-Grave, participate in a meet-up at a cemetery, or plan your own cemetery meet-up by inviting friends and relatives to go with you.

For more details and ideas, visit Find-a-Grave Community Day.

Even if you can’t participate on Saturday, the 18th, download their app* so you’re ready when you do visit a cemetery. The tombstones you capture with your camera will thrill one of their relatives someday.

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*Currently only compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

 

Find-A-Grave Webinar

Tags

cemeteries, Find-A-Grave, webinar

Being a not very old family history hunter and genealogy searcher, I love learning. Webinars, seminars, and online help interest me very much. There isn’t a webinar or seminar where I haven’t picked up a point or two, even if I’m familiar with what they’re discussing.

‘Cousin Russ’ covered the topic of Find-A-Grave on Legacy Family Tree’s webinar this week. I’ve been using Find-A-Grave for quite a while. Thought I knew just about everything about it. I mean, really, how complicated is it?

You take photos, you upload and add info. At members’ profiles, you can leave messages. There’s a photo request service — used that many times for relatives’ graves are too far away to visit. Searches can be conducted on tombstones or cemeteries. What else is there?! 😉

One of the things I wasn’t aware of was what else was available in my Contributor Profile at Find-A-Grave. Call it myopia, or looking at things with a magnifying glass instead seeing the whole picture, but I’ve missed an important tab in my profile. Even though I’ve used all the other tabs, I totally missed this one:

After hearing this was available, before the webinar was even over, I checked my profile. Oops! Two requests for edits were in there. Luckily they were only added the day before, and I took care of them after the webinar. In grabbing screen shots for this post, I discovered another edit request today.

‘Cousin Russ’ had other tips and points about using Find-A-Grave. Some were not useful to me, like using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of his photos. He had more columns than I could ever keep up with! But hey, it works for him, so that’s OK. I don’t take nearly as many photos as he does.

One of his tips was about visiting a relatives’ tombstone for the first time that you’ve found in Find-A-Grave. Before you go, study the photo(s) and look for clues, he advised. Are there trees, bushes near it? A building perhaps? Perhaps a larger monument in the background?

I’ve done this unconsciously twice with ancestors’ graves I was trying to locate in the cemetery after seeing their markers on Find-A-Grave. I recognized a red brick building that I’d seen in the background of my 3-g-grandfathers memorial on Find-A-Grave. It was a pretty large cemetery without a sexton’s office, so I would have been looking quite a while without my brain kicking that out for me. But it was good to be reminded of this helpful trick.

If you use Find-A-Grave, or are a tombstone lover (like me), view his webinar, “Find-A-Grave: A Research Tool.” [Free until August 27, 2014, then you need to be a member to view] Most of the time during it, he’s showing you real-time how he uses Find-A-Grave for various things and gives out very useful tips about each step. It was worth the hour for me because I learned new tips and techniques.

P.S. If you have Jewish or Italian ancestors, check out Legacy Family Tree’s next two webinars!

Find-A-Grave Has An App

Tags

Find-A-Grave

Instead of starting on the search page of Find-A-Grave, I happened to land on the front page today. And there it was: “The Free Find-A-Grave Mobile App is Here”.

They proclaim it’s the greatest addition to Find-A-Grave since Marilyn Monroe! Don’t know about that, but it is pretty exciting that at least one of the apps is finally out of beta. Downloadable from the iTunes store, it appears to have the major features available at their website.

• Search
• Add photo
• Create a memorial
• Request a photo

Plus a “Share” button. If that’s been on their website, I’ve missed it. And the ability to add GPS to a marker.

Yippee! What a tremendous help this will be for adding new memorials as well as finding ancestors’ graves in a cemetery I’ve never been to. Unfortunately I’ll have to wait until the Android App comes out to take it for a test drive.