cemetery – Photo Restorations by Tim G.

The Lansdowne Find-A-Grave Meetup, gathered at Fernwood Cemetery for Community Day.

The Lansdowne Find-A-Grave Meetup, gathered for Community Day. Photo by sid, annotated by sneakersox.

This past Saturday, October 18th, was Find-A-Grave Community Day. I made myself useful and joined the Lansdowne meetup at Fernwood Cemetery in Yeadon. This fine historic cemetery is located just outside of West Philadelphia. Despite the best efforts of its friendly and helpful staff, 384 unfulfilled requests have been left to accumulate there. Local Find-A-Graver Jenn O. decided to do something about that, and so she organized the Lansdowne meetup using Fernwood cemetery maps that she accumulated after years of research, and burial locations culled from Ancestry.com’s Pennsylviana Church and Town records.

Eleven of us met at the cemetery at 10:00 for introductions, assignments, e-mail exchange, and a group photo. Two additional gravers joined us shortly thereafter. We each went off to separate sections to fulfill our assignments, and occasionally met one another out in the field and shared our successes. Most of us continued photographing until about two o’clock.

Find-A-Graver CLC cameos in this photo of the Beath family monument.

We didn’t plan to reconvene after the event. For next time, I’m submitting a motion to meet up afterwards for pizza and stories. Despite not having reconvened at the cemetery after the event, we have since re-connected by e-mail, and we are looking forward to future Find-A-Grave meetup events.

Fernwood’s Find-A-Grave stats, as of Saturday morning were 10757 interments and 384 photo requests. It’s current stats, as of noontime, Monday, October 20, are: 11,136 interments and 298 photo requests, and that is despite 11 new requests having been entered since the start of the event. Needless to say, we put a rather large dent in Fernwood’s requests list, and substantially expanded its database. Many thanks to Jenn O. for organizing the meetup, and for my other fellow gravers for their great work!

I was quite pleased with the way many of my own photo contributions turned out. After finishing my assignments there, I rolled on over to my favorite adopted cemetery, Philadelphia National Cemetery, and many took more photos there. Those photos will be the subject of the sequel to this post, due out later this week. For now, enjoy my contributions to Find-A-Grave Community Day with the Lansdowne Meetup!: Continue reading

While on unintentional hiatus from my 52 Ancestors Challenge, I’ve discovered two fabulous software packages that might make my family history research a little more colorful: LibreCAD and Blender. These dicoveries came about last week as I fulfilled some Find-A-Grave photo requests at a tiny little hideaway called the Cheltenham Methodist Episcopal Churchyard. Of twenty-five photo outstanding requests, I managed to fulfill only three, and this is almost certainly due to the other other stones either not existing or being totally illegible. I thought I might do each photo requester a favor by mapping the locations of all the stones on this small patch of land and what inscriptions, if any, remained legible upon them. That way, each requester could rest assured that their requests had been fulfilled as well as can be. Continue reading