"Bring Out Your Dead"

Can I just tell you that I love calling funeral homes, cemetery offices and county death record offices? 

Not once have I ever encountered anything other than a helpful, kind employee when I've made the effort to look up a number and get on the horn. 

One lady in South Carolina (SWEET accent) offered to go outside in the snow one January day and take a picture of my relative's headstone and email it to me.

Bless you, employees.  We geeks couldn't do it without you.

Now on to today's character - my great uncle Burt Damon Bathrick*.  Never married as far as I can see, Burt lived what must have been a colorful life.  Born in 1863 in upstate New York to Lysander and Phoebe (who died when he was seven years old), the youngest child by fifteen years - Burt made his way west with his father and landed in Great Falls, Montana.  (Lysander ended up in Wyoming.)

I'm trying not to mix him up with a Bert Bathrick, who was born five years earlier and died in 1923. 

My uncle Burt held a variety of jobs, from railway laborer to beer hall employee to novelty salesman.  Just guessing from the occupations he chose, he is an adventurous, hardworking, gregarious, people-loving soul, who loved his adopted city but wasn't much for sticking around in the same job.  He never owned a home, always lived at boarding houses, which to me says he preferred to take life one day at a time.

I'm about to call Cascade county and see if he did stick around long enough to be buried there.  What's funny is, I find myself mentally stuck in the 1980s way of genealogy-ing sometimes... "So Great Falls, huh... it would be so fun to go there, but it's so far away..."

Then I remember "when" I am.  In these days of instant access to telephone numbers listed online, help is only a few clicks and a phone call away. 

Blessings abound :)

*Why Burt today?  The 1940 Census, of course.  I did an individual search on PAF using my ancestors filter (grandparents and aunts and uncles only) and filtered them by individuals born in the 1840-1941 birth range, so I didn't miss anyone.  Three hundred and ninety-six people I'm looking up.  I've already found new family members all over the place.  Yay :)

Hi there!

Yes, it's been a while... summer's over, school has started, and we just found out we'll be able to move to a nicer home, so I don't see my genealogy days becoming any less hectic. Sorry I haven't been around much.

I keep tabs on a couple of genealogy blogs I find interesting, and at Ancestry Insider, I found this post about Familysearch Indexing.

Indexing is a volunteer program that allows anyone to download images of microfilms and type the information found on them - names, dates, places, parents' names, etc. - into a grid, then send it back to Familysearch headquarters. The volunteers are helping to make a list, basically, of all the microfilmed information in the granite vault near Salt Lake - by name, location, date, subject, etc. This will all be made available online one day, free for anyone to see.

It's interesting work, but as the above post points out, sometimes you find situations that are hard to read about. Still, it's inspiring to know that because of a few minutes you spent volunteering, someone someday will be able to find his ancestors that much more easily.

Generous Genealogists

I love them. I love them, I love them, I love them. A few examples:

1) Darla, who at least weekly posts a message on my Rootsweb family tree that comes to my email. Usually her messages contain information from a book called Tombstone Hoppin', showing where family members are buried, adding to their birth, death, or relationship information. Darla is no relation, but she has this book, and she goes through my list of people and finds them in her book, and tells me what the book says about each one. Her thoughtfulness and kindness are amazing.

2) The cemetery caretakers, office workers, and funeral home employees who answer my many phone calls. "Is so-and-so buried in your cemetery?" Bless them all for their patience. They are ALWAYS nice. I'm sure they get quite a few of these requests and they must be used to it by now, but I always appreciate their kind manner and willingness to look people up for me - and then make copies and mail me stuff. Not one of them has ever asked a cent. Maybe they hope I'll throw some funeral business their way.

3) Volunteers at Findagrave.com. If you're thinking, "Here she goes with the Findagrave thing again -" too bad, because those people are made of gold. I love the networking factor: if I want a picture of a relative's headstone but don't live anywhere near that area, I can place a photo request. It's so easy. I just click on a button and my request is automatically sent out to people who have signed up to be volunteers in that area. The wonderful volunteers, like Joanne and Tracy and Donna, after accepting these requests, take time out of their busy lives to go to the cemetery, find our relatives' headstones (or lack thereof), take pictures and post them online. How Heaven-sent is that? We can't all get around to all the cemeteries we'd like to go to, but we have this website and great people to connect us with our loved ones in that way.

More than providing a way to see our ancestors' final resting places (and a chance to leave "virtual flowers" for them), the memorial pages at Findagrave very often provide valuable genealogical information - names, dates, places, parents' names, spouses' names, life histories that point us in the right direction. Also, seeing the headstone of someone whose name I've only seen on paper makes that person seem more "real" to me. I feel closer to her, knowing that I am looking on the ground where she was last seen by her dear family.

Just this morning I received another email saying a photo request had been fulfilled, for my very elusive Aunt Dott. What a blessing to finally find her, to know when and where she died and where she was buried.

Bless you all, you wonderful sharers - may I be counted among your ranks.