ROOTS & BRANCHES

One of the most faithful Blair County “Roots & Branches” readers is Steve Kleiner.

And one of the things I like about him is that he’s not afraid to speak his mind, especially when your columnist writes something about which Kleiner has more information.

What I wrote a few weeks ago, in my two-part column of genealogy library core collection is that repositories ought to be caution in devoting shelf space to books of transcriptions of cemetery inscriptions since aggregation websites such as Find A Grave and Billion Graves have so many inscriptions on the Internet, a fair portion of which contain photos of the tombstones.  

I also noted that the flip side of the Internet websites is that many times they do not have memorials for every grave and therefore can be incomplete. In addition cemeteries left “partially completed” on the websites, published tombstone collections may have records of inscriptions  

“Your article a couple weeks back touches on the use of cemetery data for research,” Kleiner wrote. “You noted that websites such as Find A Grave have incomplete records for individual cemeteries. True.”

Kleiner noted the reasons for that are multiple, but one that stands out in a project that he works on for the Hollidaysburg Presbyterian Cemetery is that the headstones are often missing, damaged or otherwise unreadable.

“So, for my project (and hobby) I’ve combined multiple sources to see what I can dig up about missing or forgotten folks buried in that cemetery,” Kleiner wrote.

“Aside from many visits to the cemetery, my sources include a book of transcribed burial church records, the Archie Claar Cemetery Inscriptions book for the cemetery, a compilation of burial transactions by a local funeral home, and online obituary information.  My source for those has been the Blair County Genealogical Society.”

Additionally, he says he’s found good leads on burials published in older newspapers by using the Ancestry.com-owned subscription database Newspapers.com.

“Information I find via the above ends up in my data and on Find A Grave if it’s not there already,” Kleiner wrote. 

So far for Hollidaysburg Presbyterian Cemetery, Kleiner’s identified about 800 graves that were not on Find A Grave!

In one case, Kleiner was dealing with a faded engraving of what appeared to be brothers who died withing a couple months of each other in 1844.

Kleiner sleuthed through the sources he previously mentioned and determined the boys were John Milton Snyder and Henry Baxter Snyder, sons of Jacob and Sarah Snyder born six years apart.

The moral to the story is to not sell Find A Grave researchers short: They may well be adding documentation way beyond what can still be read on tombstones.