Something exciting (for me) happened this week - I got my first Findagrave message! It was a request to add a maiden name to one of the memorials that I had added. I do not yet have “big numbers” in Findagrave, both because I don’t get much of a chance to spend time in cemeteries and because many of the pictures/transcriptions that I have done are already in Findagrave, so I was really pleased to be able to do this for someone. (Note to self: Try to get out to cemeteries more often!)
More luck at Italiangen.org: I found a Benedetto and Maria Davi who, based on calculated year of birth, appear to be the people I have identified as parents of Giovanna “Jeni” Davi, my husband’s great-grandmother. I’ll be sending off for death certificates within the next couple of weeks. The Davis I found died in 1934, so I’m hoping that the form will be as detailed as the 1907 one I received for Julius Koehl and that the informants knew who their parents were.
I did some bookmark cleanup and organization - added some links to my Texas links and some items to my Research toolboxes here and on Weebly. I have also started working up a list of resources on Diigo. What did I learn? Bookmarking and bookmark organization takes a lot of time! This needs to be one of my resolutions - do a bit of bookmark management each weekend before I start regular research.
This weekend I discovered the “U.S. Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection” on Ancestry.com. It gives the full text of the record plus extracted information. Pretty neat if one of the names you are researching shows up there - for the person I was researching, in addition to the full obituary, it provided names of parents, siblings, spouse, children, age at death, residence, date and place of birth, date of death, and military service in a convenient form for reference. I’ll have to give it a whirl with some other names.
Strange item of the week:
Three Nora Lees? I have been working on the family of Minnie Brinlee and Raligh Jones. Their oldest daughter was Nora Lee, who married Charles Alexander Whitaker. Their oldest son, Cecil Odes, married a Nora Lee Small and another son, Burl, married a Nora Lee Scroggins. Or so say the entries on Findagrave.
Thanks for the hint about U.S. Cemetery...being on ancestry. Need to check it out. I hope I can find it.
ReplyDeleteLike you, also had a person leave me a FAG message and I can't wait to share. I hope the maiden name helps in your research.
That's cool about the Cemetery database on Ancestry. I didn't know they had that. Will have to check out soon.
ReplyDeleteI just found an entire family in one plot on findagrave. That was the good news. The bad news is that I was just in that cemetery two weeks ago and it is about 10 states away from me :-(
ReplyDeleteBarbara - I checked out several different hits there - some have more detail than others, since they are taken from various source, but the one I used was really helpful.
ReplyDeleteTonia - I keep forgetting to regularly check Ancestry and Family Search for new databases - I should do that every week.
Debi - I hate it when that happens! But maybe you can use it as an excuse for a return visit?