Tech T.I.P. – December 17, 2009

Cemetery Inventories and Find A Grave
by Denise Olson

I recently rediscovered several cemetery inventories that were part of the papers in my aunt's estate. She and her sister had been involved with their local historical society and had participated in a county-wide project to inventory the county's cemeteries. The inventory documents I have are probably 25-30 years old. They are typewritten on onion skin paper—legal size at that. There's also a hand-drawn cemetery map (also in legal size) included with the inventory. There are only four cemeteries included in this package of documents, probably because each appears to have some family members buried in them. I also have several headstone photos from the cemetery where the most of our family are buried. This can only mean one thing…Find A Grave!

Unfortunately, the combination of onion skin and old typewriter ribbons make any thought of scanning impossible. The data entry screen at Find A Grave is nice, but not useful when you're trying to quickly transcribe a bunch of records. Fortunately, they offer an Excel template just for that purpose and it makes things go a whole lot faster. You can download the template from the Add Burial Records page. As you see below, all the instructions are included on the spreadsheet. It's really that simple. Find A Grave does ask that you use one spreadsheet file per cemetery and that you have at least 25 records in each file to submit.

The Find A Grave spreadsheet provides a good template for any cemetery inventory project. While it only collects grave information, it is still a good resource for organizing the project.

Once you've transcribed the graves onto the spreadsheet and uploaded them to Find A Grave, what do you do with the spreadsheets? Keep them! A spreadsheet is very versatile. Because the information is organized consistently, it's easy to manipulate the data. Spreadsheet data can be easily imported into databases and other applications. Make sure you edit the spreadsheet's metadata (File > Properties command in Excel) to provide information about the source of this data. That information will stay with the inventory records as long as this file remains intact.

 
Example of the properties pane in Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac.

Offer them to the historical and/or genealogical society local to your records. Post them on your Graveyard Rabbit blog. If you're maintaining a WeRelate research page for your cemeteries, post them there—a link to the cemetery's page on Find A Grave would be good too. The more visible this data is, the more it can help other researchers find the information they need.

My aunts left me a valuable treasure. They spent hours tromping through overgrown cemeteries to collect the information and more time typing it up and making copies. I'm sure the complete record book at the historical society's headquarters is a very useful book, but unfortunately I'm not able to get up there every time I need to check a date. My transcription effort required a fraction of the original effort to collect that information, but by posting it to Find A Grave and other relevant web sites I'm giving it a visibility it would never have otherwise. And, hopefully, give another researcher the information needed to break through her brick wall.