This has been a busy year for us with new grandchildren and a little travel. Our children are now on the west coast, so this will be our first Christmas without them here in Georgia.

That said, we still plan to have a great Christmas and hope all of you do. We appreciate everyone's encouragement and ideas for this web site and hope it is offering help with your research.

On a personal level I find it hard to get excited about death certificates, especially at Christmas. However, this final piece of documentation on each of our lives has great value regardless of the season. I doubt that there is a "good" time to spend a few quality hours going through the data.

In addition to information on the deceased you can also expect to find birth locations, parents, spouses, death location, and a few other tidbits that make them worth reading. To our surprise we found information on several undocumented infant deaths, and more than a few additional spouses for family members. In total we found about 340 certificates in Georgia alone, and these are all up on the web site now for anyone to use. My one resolve after working on this area is that I am going to design my own tombstone. Having looked at birth, military, marriage, and death records I have concluded that on one can keep any date straight.

I am about half serious, but maybe more like sixty percent when I say I want to design my own tombstone. Having visited more than a few cemeteries I know more about what lasts and what does not last. I also know that relatives often get names and dates wrong, which just confuses things as time passes.

When my father passed away in 2000 I decided to do a genealogical tombstone for him that would eliminate any question about who he was related to when studied in the future by other genealogists. On his tombstone we listed his full name; when and where he was born and died; who he married; his children and their birth dates; his parents; his grandparents; and his great-grandparents. We also did his tombstone in granite and made it a ledger style which sits flush with the ground.

Why? Granite is certainly better than other, softer stone you see in many older cemeteries. A ledger cannot be tipped over by vandals. Maintenance is easier making for a better grave site. We know his genealogy and I had rather have it "cast in stone" than have others butcher it with poor or incomplete research in the future.

Think about it. Who knows you better than you?

While visiting relatives in South Carolina in late November, we took a side trip to Greenwood County and photographed two cemeteries.

The Elmwood cemetery in downtown Ninety-Six, South Carolina has a number of relatives for Kathy's family and we photographed forty-one tombstones.

At the Mount Lebanon United Methodist Church we picked up another sixty-one tombstones. This cemetery is interesting because it is filled with burials with surnames that match exactly with a dozen or more families in our database. But unfortunately we do not know the connection of anyone to our families yet. In all likelihood they will match to Kathy's family in the Greenwood County, area.

The photographs from both of these cemeteries are already out on the web site.

As I mentioned last month, I will need to do a major redesign on the area of cemetery records. I have already started the work and made it through England and Alaska because there wasn't much there. I am now working in Alabama records and will just have to work my way down through it one cemetery at a time. When I get to Georgia I will probably need a large bottle of wine.

To make things a little easier in the record keeping department we are changing the way in which we track records in our main files.

Until now we only added someone to our files once we proved that they were definitely connected to the family. This complicates generating information for the web site since it leaves lots of records outside of our main information repository.

To solve this problem we are expanding the information in our files to include individuals that we feel have a high likelihood of matching to the family when more research is completed.

For example, if we are researching the Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens, Georgia and we find ten relatives from our files, they would all be documented. But if there are five others in adjoining graves with the same surname and relevant dates we have not added them in the past unless we knew the relationship.

The tracking of these individuals was all manual, and when later connections were made it was difficult to know if we already had data on them. So we have started to add individuals to the file with a high probability of matching when further research is completed.

Starting with the December update of the "All Individuals" section of the web site you might see new people who seem to be unconnected to anyone else. They are there to satisfy this tracking need and to provide a method of letting people know we have information, we just don't have the connection.