Graveyard Guru 10/20/2011

 

Cemeteries and Location Based Genealogy

By Stephanie Lincecum

There are those of us that love cemeteries for the art and history, and there are those of us who are in cemeteries solely for the genealogy.  And of course, there are those of us to which both apply! October is Family History Month, so I thought we’d look at cemeteries as Bernie Gracy describes them:  large public databases.

Bernie Gracy is the man behind AncestralHunt.com and location based genealogy.  I was introduced to him almost a year ago at the 2010 Atlanta (Georgia) Family History Expo.  He was teaching a lesson on location based genealogy to a jam packed classroom.

The principal idea behind location based research, according to Mr. Gracy, is that genealogy is very much a geographic issue.  And the first law of geography is that “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related to each other.” (Quote attributed to Waldo Tobler, geographer and cartographer.)

Let me share with you something that happened to me not that long ago.  When researching a tombstone for one Mrs. Mary Ann Mitchell that I photographed in one particular cemetery, one of the names inscribed (that of her husband Madison Redd Mitchell) seemed very familiar to me.  Going back through my files, I found the connection.  That name was mentioned on a couple of tombstones I had photographed before.  Without realizing it, though I was in a completely different cemetery, I had also captured images of the tombstones for Mary and Madison’s son Thomas and Madison’s second wife Caroline Orr.

The important thing to note is that these two cemeteries were not far from each other in the same city.  However, I suggest that there might be genealogy researchers interested in this family that have yet to make the connection.  Why? Because oftentimes researchers are looking for a lone tombstone based on where their research has led them thus far.  But what if the research had started in the cemeteries of the community in which their ancestors lived and died? Could more family connections be made? That is the principal of location based research.

Of course, cemeteries aren’t the only “public databases” to be considered when conducting location based research, but they are a great place to start.  As Mr. Gracy likes to say, “The Truth Is Out There!”