Not Your Everyday Volunteer Gig
What’s your Find A Grave ID Number?
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“I myself am strange and unusual.”
Ah, the line delivered by none other than Winona Ryder herself. I felt that when she said it. I too am strange and unusual. How many of you have a Find A Grave account, I ask?
Yes, for over four years now I’ve had an account with the FaG site. I used to love traipsing around graveyards and cemeteries. It brought my two great loves together-photograph and family history.
I haven’t been able to do much of anything with the site other than to use it to help fill in the blanks of my family tree since I’ve had to medically retire. But man oh man, when I could still get out and about and walk for hours?
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeet you couldn’t tell me anything!
Jigger bites (and they ITCH!), sunburn, snakes, my leg falling into a grave knee-deep when the grave collapsed. No, I’m not kidding.
The silence. The aloneness of it all. Research and document. *sigh*
Then I really went hard with the project and contacted Delaware and Maryland’s government offices that deal with cemeteries. I had forms I could include GPS coordinates to help locate some sites.
I documented quite a few that were two to a dozen of lone headstones in the middle of some farmer’s field. I’d wait until crops were out and then the headstones were easy enough to see. Getting the government involved meant that the information would be preserved regardless of what happened to the land in the future.
Going by the numbers, I am surprised that I knocked out as much information as I had.
800 memorials entered by hand
That means until I happened upon them they didn’t exist in the database. All info on each grave had to be manually entered.
2327 photos added, mostly headstones but some cemetery information as well
Photographers will tell you, that just because the photo has been taken, doesn’t mean the task is complete. That’s the easy part. Now you have to transfer the images from your device to your laptop, cleanup, lighten/darken, crop, etc., and then upload to the FaG site. 2327 times.
34 volunteer photos taken
People using the site can place requests for volunteers. We volunteer photographers can then search by miles from x zip code and make a day of specifically hunting down headstones, photographing them, and then getting them on the site. I got a lot of thank you’s from those efforts. It was cool to know that I helped someone fill out their family tree or work their way past a brick wall they had hit.
8 headstone photos transcribed
If you’ve ever tried to read some old headstones… #nuffsaid
I keep hoping I’ll be able to get back to it again one day. Mainly when I hit the open road. I have a lot of the US left to see before I hit Mexico for the first time or Canada again. But I’ll be clicking the dead all along the way.
