Tip - Cemetery Research

The club's March meeting featured a guest speaker, Marian Pierre-Louis, who presented her talk on "Finding the Gems in New England Cemeteries". Marian was a dynamic and engaging speaker who routinely presents various talks at area genealogy conferences.

She talked at some length about the details and differences between conducting traditional and non-traditional cemetery research. Traditional cemetery research involves physically visiting the cemetery site and photographing and/or transcribing the headstones yourself. Non-traditional research is using the Internet to locate a cemetery and/or headstone information and photographs. The two best Internet resources for cemetery specific data to know about is www.findagrave.com and www.interment.net. Of special interest for New England cemeteries is www.gravematter.com which features only cemeteries in New England, but note that site does not appear to have been updated in the past couple of years.

The site www.findagrave.com includes some 23 million records worldwide, with over 1200 just for Massachusetts. The site is entirely volunteer driven. You can enter data for an ancestor, then once entered, you can click on the "request photo" button to send a photo request to a volunteer who will take the photo of the headstone and then upload it to the site. Of course you can post your own photos of headstones.

The site www.interment.net does not include photos of headstones but does include lots of transcriptions. You can lookup potential ancestors via their surname. Note that the transcriptions appear to be for the entire cemetery and do not appear to be literals transcriptions of the headstones in all case.

Marion concluded her talk by discussing some of the latest trends in cemetery research including using GPS to locate the cemetery and even headstones themselves, and two different methods of attaching a device to a headstone that contains family tree information for the deceased person's family (the device is read using a special handheld unit).

--Brian Lingard