[or-roots] Cemetery listings

[Leslie Chapman]

I also appreciate all the suggestions for cemetery transcriptions. We at
LUGS have been working on Reedsport, Oregon IOOF Cemetery for about a year
now. I volunteered to do the data entry as one of the more experienced
computer geeks in the group and since I have lots of family there, to date I
list about 2000 plus records of which a couple hundred are either listings
for spouses not buried there whom I ultimately will not be able to list or
unknown names that either crept into my data base from unknown sources or
from the online listing of about fifteen years ago which I used as  the base
file for my data base. I can sympathize very much with the folks who have
produced error riddled products. The Sexton records we checked against had
about 3 or 4 hundred errors in them. A lot of that was a result of data
input in their file. Some of it is because the official record does not
agree with what is on the tombstone. We are taking the step, albiet rather
slowly (so far I am the only one to attempt to do so and I spent one
afternoon) of checking against the funeral home records.

I mentioned this whole story before, but feel you all need to know how much
work it is and if you have the opportunity to help somebody with a project
like this and can take the time, please do. I am now to the point where I
can run off a copy of each section of the cemetery and hand it to the
original committee to error check. I expect the error count to be under 10%.
I have gone over the complete listing three times to reach that stage.

I hope to create a searchable web site where an individual can do a query on
first last or spouse name, year of birth or death etc, but probably we will
end up just posting simple text to rootsweb for the forseeable future as
most of us are working stiffs and don't have time to do that much work. as
to listing by alphabetical order, that is fairly simple, but I would like to
point out to all of you that you can search most web sites with most web
browsers by just hitting CTRL F	which should bring up a find dialogue box.
If you don't find what you think should be their, try using part of the
surname or the first name, or a nickname. for example Dick for Richard,
Jerry for Gerald etc, Chap or man for Chapman or in Chris' example; burn for
Attaburn. Of course the rub there is if the site is broken down by letter or
letters of the alphabet and the lister has an error in the first character,
you have serious trouble. Such as our Nettie Mewhirter listed as Newhirter.

I especially appreciate the suggestion that location and history of the
cememetery be included. I intend to develop a map of the cemetery with
individual plots listed when I can get them mapped out. That has been one of
the hangups as the sexton records are riddled with errors. If someone who
has a relative buried here with no headstone wants to know where that person
is buried, they would quite likely be out of luck.

Les C