Friday’s Find – webcemeteries.com

I would venture to say that most genealogists/family historians have heard of findagrave.com. It is definitely one of the most popular websites for user-submitted burial information. Well, a few months ago I came across webcemeteries.com. In a way they are the opposite type of service in that they provide “cemetery internet packages” to cemeteries both large and small in order for them to create websites and searchable databases of their own records. They also have an American Legacy Initiative that provides small cemeteries and independent genealogists with the tools needed to create and manage websites and databases for the burial records of legacy cemeteries.

When you visit the webcemeteries home page, you can click on the “Search Cemeteries” option to get a listing of all the cemeteries participating in their program. I did a quick count and came up with about 36 or 37 on the current cemeteries list and almost as many on the legacy list. I noticed several from Pennsylvania (which is where most of my research is centered), but there are other states represented as well.

If you find a cemetery of interest on the list, you can click on it to go directly to the website for that cemetery.  From there you can then click on the “Search Records” option and enter the last name (and optionally the first name) to get a list of matches within that cemetery. I tried a partial surname search (i.e. I typed “SMI” for the last name, and all the Smiths, etc were returned by the search.)

In addition to searching on a per cemetery basis, you can optionally search all the cemeteries in their system at once. In order to do this, select “Genealogy and Memorials” from the home page. You will be taken to the site cemsearch.com. The search box on this site will return a list of all the matching records from all the cemeteries in the webcemetery program. Clicking on one of the returned matches will take you to the individual cemetery record for further information.

Webcemeteries is a site definitely worth checking out. You may also want to monitor it every couple of months or so to see if any new cemeteries of interest to you have joined their program.

So that’s the Friday’s Find this week — webcemeteries.com!

New Databases at FamilySearch.org

If you haven’t gone to the FamilySearch.org site lately you may want to click on over and check it out. They have been adding tons of databases – some with images and some without. Of particular interest to me has been the birth, marriage and death databases for a variety of states, including New Jersey, Ohio, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota and others. In my goal to identify “all” descendants of some of my immigrant ancestors, I have been quite successful in finding records for several distant (and not so distant) cousins that moved out of our ancestral home state of Pennsylvania.

Now there are a couple of things of which to be aware. For the databases that include images, I believe you need to be registered and logged in to view the actual images. This is really not a big deal since registration is FREE!!

The other thing is that if I know a cousin moved to a certain area, I find it useful to focus my search to a particular database – say the New Jersey marriage database. The easiest way that I have found to do this is to go the main screen and click on the appropriate region under the “Browse by Location” – in my case that would be “USA, Canada, Mexico.”

That brings up a new screen with a listing of all the Historical Records for that area of the world. Rather than scrolling through the list, I type “New Jersey” in the search box on the upper left and the list automatically is pared down to only the records pertaining to that place.

Now it’s just a matter of clicking on the appropriate collection which will take you to the focused search screen. From there I usually just enter the surname and see what records I can find. You automatically get  exact and close matches, although if the surname is really badly mangled in the index you may need to search on a combination of first name and dates.

Also bear in mind that they are constantly adding new collections so if you can’t find what you are looking for check back in a month or so and try again – you never know when the records you’ve been searching for may be added.

Till later,

~j

Why can’t I find my ancestor in the census?

One of my research strategies (and I think this one probably applies to most family researchers) is that I like to try to find an individual in all the available censuses that span that individual’s life – particularly the censuses from 1850 on in which all the household members were identified by name.  So it always bothers me when an individual or family “goes missing.” Now I do realize that on occasion an individual or family actually was missed by the census taker; but more often than not, the family (or individual) was enumerated but the name was misspelled or misinterpreted or a birth date or age is so far off it that it appears to be a different individual. So I thought that I would list some of the reasons that these elusive ancestors cannot be found with a follow-up post on strategies that can be used to find them.

Now there are a few different online sites available which have searchable census records, and we’ll talk about them more in the follow-on post. But regardless of which online site you use, the census images are only searchable because they have been indexed – and the indexes have been built by humans. The quality and accuracy of the index is dependent on the ability of the people who build it to 1) read/interpret the census images and 2) type that information correctly into the index. If the index does not accurately represent what is on the image, there are transcription errors.

Most transcription errors occur because the person/people who create the index do not interpret what is on the image correctly. This could be because the census image is damaged or faded, the quality of penmanship of the person who wrote the census may be poor or the indexer may not be familiar with old-style cursive script. Also, the indexers are human and even if they read the data correctly, they may type it wrong! Most of the major companies that sponsor the building of the indexes have checks in place that are designed to catch transcription errors, but some always seem to sneak through! In other words, the person being researched is correctly represented on the original census image, but the data in the index is wrong. And since it is the index that is being searched, a match is not found.

The other main reason that families or individuals cannot be found is because they are incorrectly represented on the census form itself. One example of why incorrect information may be on the original image is that the further back we go, fewer people could read and write English. And often their spoken English was heavily accented. So the census taker would write what he heard and the individual was not able to correct him.

Another problem is that the person supplying the information to the census taker may have given him bad information — either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes information was supplied by neighbors or children or extended family members and things like ages, dates and places of birth were “guessed.” In fact, ages are often inaccurate either because they were estimated or intentionally “fudged.” Even last names may have been altered. I have seen quite a few times when the youngest child was born considerably more than nine months after the death of the mother’s deceased husband, yet still carries his name. Often step-children from a mother’s previous marriage were incorrectly enumerated with the name of the current husband. I even have a case where a young girl was living with her older, married sister and was listed with the last name of the sister and her husband.

Another “bad” data problem I’ve run into more than once is that since divorce and separation used to carry quite a stigma, often-times people told the census taker they were single or widowed rather than divorced. This has tripped me up more than a few times because after seeing that the man or woman was widowed, I would not bother to even look for the spouse in another household. It also tends to really throw you off when you’re looking for an obituary or death record in the wrong decade!

Yet another way errors were introduced is that multiple copies of the census were generated to collate and also for different levels of jurisdiction. So errors could have been introduced or lines missed when coping from one form to another. (Remember, there were no scanners or copy machines!)

So the bottom line is that your ancestor may be “hiding” due to a transcription error, bad or inaccurate data on the census form itself or a combination of the two!! Now that we’ve discussed various reasons why we can’t find someone in the census, my next post will contain some strategies for finding them!

UPDATE: If you are interested in some of the strategies I used to successfully find some elusive relatives in the 1920 census, check out my success story here.