Your Quick Tips, 11 December 2006

Background Pictures
When our grandchildren were with us at Thanksgiving, I got out some of my father’s pictures, taken seventy to eighty years ago. Fortunately many of them had barns, fields, and livestock in the background, which helped me tell about our family history. The lesson for today is: Take not only pictures of faces, but also of buildings, land, animals, etc.

Roy L. Howard
Chattanooga, Tennessee

Buried With His Ex-Wife
I spent two years searching for my great-grandfather’s death date; his wife died in 1903 at age fifty-six so I knew he died between 1903 and ca. 1945. I rang the local cemeteries, and because I knew the grave number and resting place of his wife (they had been separated since 1890), I asked who was in or near her grave, not expecting him to be there, but he was. So now if I have information on the grave, I find out who else might be near.
 
Carol Bradley

Photographing Tombstones to Share
I live in a very rural area and volunteer for an organization to do cemetery photos upon request. There are a lot of old, abandoned cemeteries around here, and whenever I have a photo request at one of them I try to spend a little extra time and get photos of surrounding tombstones. If the cemetery is small enough, I try to get pictures of all the stones. So many have been broken, buried, or are weather-worn, and I figure this is one way of preserving what is left of them. I post all the photos to the Find-A-Grave site (http://www.findagrave.com) so that anybody looking for the information has it available, for free. If the stone is hard to read, but I can pick out part of a name, I often check census records or other county information to find the name.

Bonnie Selig
Jo Daviess Co, IL RAOGK Volunteer
Find-a-Grave County Keeper
My site

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3 thoughts on “Your Quick Tips, 11 December 2006

  1. I gained a lot of education with this article and I commend each of the members for being so diligent.

  2. Hi , I belong to a family site that repairs and looks up grave stones. I have heard them say that they clean them up so you can read them by using shaving cream. It won’t hurt them but seems to help!Hope so anyway. Loretta

  3. hey,
    My name is Karissa May and i thought you could help me out with my family tree.My uncle has been working on this family tree for a while now and he lives in ohio and i live in another state so he can’t help me.I’m just getting syarted on this to so if you would please leave me an e-mail “[email protected]
    Thank You,
    Karissa may

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