A Rabbit's Review 7/7/2011

E Books and Apps for Your Next Summer Trip

By LisaMary Wichowski

Mid summer vacations are upon us.  Hooray for prime season for cemetery road trips!  Along with chigger repellant, boots high enough to avoid snakebites, a notebook and a good hat there are some e-books and apps that need to be in your car or carry-on for effective day in the field.

E Books

One of my favorite types of e-books is the travel guide.  Traveling with full size copies of a Frommers,  a Lonely Planet and a  Rick Steves’ Guide is just darn near impossible, but in e-book version really convenient.  The same is true for individual cemetery guides.  More and more cemeteries are producing apps and putting guides and maps in electronic, interactive formats.  I’ll still buy any hard copy guides I can get, especially because they often are fundraisers for “Friends” groups, but with an e-guide I can keep my souvenir in keepsake shape.

E-books, and most apps, tend to be inexpensive but vary widely in quality.  E-books give authors who have found potential publications blocked by traditional publishers a way to share their information with the public. If they’re free or low cost I’m willing to take a chance, I might find a neat bit of information I otherwise wouldn’t know. 

Keep in mind that there are Kindle and Nook apps available free for iPad or Droid, and for the Mac or PC.   Any title available in either of these formats is accessible to anyone with a computer.

Available through iTunes, Kindle or Nook

Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister is far and away one of the best books to keep in your field bag.  Deco or Nouveau?  Need a comprehensive list of acronyms.  Deciphering exactly that pelican means?   The answer is in this book, available in hard bound also, I find the e version helpful on the road, but have a well used copy on my desk. Most of Keister’s books are available or forthcoming in in several formats.   All are well researched, fun to read and full of great information. 

Hollywood Forever Cemetery: The Unauthorized Guide by  Mark Masek.  Some vacations are meant for escapism, and Hollywood is just the place for that, dead or alive.

On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery by Robert M. Poole and Robert M M. Poole

Kindle & Nook

The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom and Reid S. Yalom.   (Reviewed September 2010).  I recommend this in printed text rather than e-book.  More of a literary reflection than a useful field guide.  Great to read before you visit a region. 

Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians Alan Jabbour (Reviewed March 2011) 

I Tunes only

Translating Tombstones by Minda Powers-Douglas.  This is a really great book for a mixed age group of cemetery novices.  I especially recommend it for scout groups embarking on a new cleanup project.

Kindle Only

A Graveyard Preservation Primer by Lynette Strangstad.  Also useful to have as an e-book and desk copy.  Information on which data to collect, proper mapping techniques, maintenance questions.  A great book to have on workdays with your local Friends of Cemeteries group.

Cities of the Dead by William Blair.  Focuses on contested commemoration of  the Civil War.  A valuable read, asks more questions than it answers.

Regional or Local Guides

Arlington National Cemetery: A Guided Tour through History by Cynthia Parzych

Tours, Nook also

Texas Cemeteries: The Resting Places of Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Interesting Texans (Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage Series) by Bill Harvey

Pioneer Cemetery Evokes Mexican Migrant Roots in Arizona by Eduardo Barraza

Legends and Lore of Illinois: Resurrection Cemetery by Michael Kleen

Old Burial Grounds of New Jersey: A Guide by Janice Kohl Sarapin 

Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story by Dennis McCann

Nook

Barnes and Noble’s Nook is carving out a niche for itself in small demand publication.  For this reason there are already a large number of documents that may be of interest to genealogists and Rabbits alike.  There are transcriptions, records books, catalogs and facsimiles of early histories for a growing list of cemeteries.  For the researcher there are also dissertations, copies of records from microfiche and texts of original dedication speeches.  Most of the historical documents are free to download.  If you are visiting an area this is a great place to begin a search for historical documentation into a specific site.

APPS

Apps are just beginning to be adapted to cemetery tourism, following a small explosion in genealogy apps

Currently apps are divided into those that help you locate a specific grave and those that are guide books.    I expect most of the major tourist sites such as New York City’s Green-Wood and Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill to have them up and available by early spring, with others very soon after.

iPhone/iPad

Specific cemetery grave locators.  Generally searchable by name of deceased, mostly with GPS locator help.

St Matthew’s Cemetery Ville De Quebec  

Hillside Cemetery City of Medicine Hat, Alberta.  

iGreendale Greendale Cemetery, Meadville PA,  

Billion Graves    Crowd sourced photos and GPS coordinates of cemeteries around the world.

iLocate-Cemeteries   To be perfectly honest, I have to mention it if nothing else because of their ad; “There is nothing like finding a new Cemetery just when you need it.”  Indeed. This is probably the least useful of the apps I tested.  Incomplete listings of burial grounds, no historical information, and it simply didn’t always work.

 Grave Sites Capsule biographies and internment listings for famous people. 

Cemetery Tours

Arlington National Cemetery  Primarily a slide show assisted walking tour. A decent choice for those who want to avoid the official tour.   No search capability, and not interactive.  I expect there to be an upgrade to address these issues in the next release.

Asheville Cemetery Tour  Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina. Driving /Walking tour with GPS map and audio directions.  Stories of the denizens and images of many memorials.  So well done that an armchair traveler can enjoy.

Meet me at Pere Lachaise.  This is especially well done, and sets a standard for those tour apps to come.   Great photos and maps If you need help finding Isadora Duncan, Jim Morrison (who may or may not be buried here, depending if he’s dead or not) or the closest WC this is a great app.

Iperelachaise.  Not as well done as the previous, but  a nice supplement, and free.

Wicked Walks Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery - two hour walking tour.  Wicked Walks mostly specializes in self-guided ghost tours, this is the only cemetery specific title in their lineup.

Droid Apps

RIPNAV   Can send info directly to social media.

Find Grave Currently available as in beta release.  Will have full access to the Find A Grave database. I would wait for it to get out of beta testing as I found it to be a bit prone to hanging.  Find A Grave is so ubiquitous that this will dominate the market.

As these things always go there are, of course, things I’ve left off that you may not agree with.    In the list I’ve tried to stay away from “haunted” place books and those focusing on artistic images of memorials.  In the first case, there are better reviewers than I in this area and I would heartily welcome someone who would do so.  In the second, I can only advocate owning as many as you can.  If you are a fellow photographer looking at the best work of others is one of the best ways to grow as an artist.  If not, what better way to while away the colder months than an armchair tour of places not yet seen to plan your next adventure!