This month I have continued to work on the conversion of the cemetery records to the new web site.

Apparently I misjudged the number of photographs we have, because this is taking much longer than I had hoped. Currently I am in the cemeteries of South Carolina (working down the alphabet) so I can see the end of the line. The procedure I am using to clean up the pictures is explained on a separate page and can be viewed if you have an interest. Unfortunately some of the older images are about as good as they will get unless we revisit the cemeteries over time.

The clean up of the cemetery records is also helping with our overall accuracy. I learned that over the years we captured some information that never made it into our files. So this process of clean up and checking is providing a more complete picture of the families we are researching. I think I may have said, but I am also building a cross-reference to our Family Tree Maker file so that you can print a report for any county and know who we think was buried there and whether or not we have a photograph of their tombstone. I just finished working a little in Habersham County, Georgia and you can see that report to get a feel for the report and our data at this point.

Not counted in the reports is the photographs of potential family members from each cemetery since they do not appear in our Family Tree Maker file. My best estimate is that there are a equal number of photographs of potential and proven relatives. As of today, April 18, I have catalogued 1,067 pictures of known relatives. So the total pictures probably totals 2,100 or 2,200. South Carolina and Tennessee will have a reasonable number of photographs, so i am guessing we will finish up with about 2,500 to 2,750 pictures.

There is a lot here, but there could be a lot more.

One big chore that is out of the way is the addition of the functionality that allows one to search our whole database for an individual or family.

We replaced that function with the one from the old web site, but updated everything with current data. We plan to update it on the first of each month going forward to keep it current.

If you have some spare time and would like to help, please contact me. I need volunteers to help move information from the old web site to the new one.

My next work will probably be in the area of obituaries since it ties in closely with the cemetery records. If you have time and can collect obituaries from the old site, as well as new ones, then please let me know.

For the next few months this will be a mixed bag of items, but you will see the menu change each time we add something new.

We are also learning that there are some good ideas that were overlooked in the last web site and we want to be sure to include them this time.

One oversight from the last time around was oral histories. You will see a link for those on the welcome page and we plan to add space for any that can be collected. We already have a few, but this may be our best source of ancedotal information on the family.

Thanks to everyone for the encouragement!