Tech T.I.P. – July 2, 2009

The Cemetery Portal at WeRelate
by Denise Olson

WeRelate is consistently named the best of the best in any list of family history web sites.  Not only does it provide a free platform for building your family tree and documenting the lives of the people who populate it, it also provides facilities to document related information such as sources, places, research guides, and images to help the researcher.  We Rabbits will be especially interested in the growing collection of cemetery pages found here.  Cemeteries are doing so well, a Cemetery Portal has been set up to help users find these helpful resources.

When you arrive at the Cemetery Portal page, you'll see that it's content addresses both the researcher and the contributor.  The left column contains boxes to help you find cemeteries by location and type, while the right column contains information on how you can support the effort to document cemeteries here at WeRelate.  Visit the featured cemetery to get a look at a well-designed cemetery page.

You'll quickly find that WeRelate cemetery pages have varying levels of useful content.  Some pages only provide a location and contact information.  Others provide histories, photos, inventories, and links to other research resources.  [Note: If the folks creating these pages aren't already Graveyard Rabbits, we need to be seriously recruiting them.]

Notice the left column in the cemetery page above contains "place" information—even a map.  Here, the main column contains a photo and the beginning of a narrative history of the cemetery.

In this case, the narrative comes straight from an article I wrote on the Huguenot Cemetery, so of course I included a note and a link to my original post.  Notice that I've also included links to my site as a research resource, along with a link to my Flickr photos for that cemetery.  As it turns out, I'm providing some significant resources for anyone who may have ancestors here.  Isn't that exactly what we Rabbits are trying to accomplish?

One last thing on this page is Categories.  By entering these category "tags" on the page, I have ensured this page will be included in the appropriate category lists automatically generated within WeRelate.  So, when you click on the link for cemeteries in the USA from the Cemetery Portal page, you'll be taken to an index of cemeteries by state and then by county.  I haven't yet set a type category for this cemetery, but once I do researchers will be able to find it that way too.

Why do I build these pages at WeRelate?  First, because blog posts are by design somewhat disjointed - I write about whatever inspires me at the moment—it doesn't collect and organize all the information about a single cemetery in one location.  WordPress does provide the capability to build pages for that purpose, but other blog platforms don't.  By using WeRelate as that collection point for both my content and other sources, I not only provide a service to researchers but I also give The Graveyard Rabbit of Moultrie Creek a bit more visibility.

Stop by the Cemetery Portal at WeRelate and see for yourself what a worthwhile effort this is.  Even if you can't take on adding your cemeteries to the collection, please include a link to the Portal as a resource for cemetery researchers.