Tombstone Tuesday: Magdalena Keller

This is another in my collection of "I-love-it-but-it's-not-family" tombstone photos. This stone marks the grave of Magdalena Keller, possibly the wife of John Philip Keller, in the Christ Reformed Cemetery in Middletown, Maryland. There are not a lot of tombstones in this cemetery made of this material and pierced around the edge. All of those I found mark the graves of German-speaking families buried in the late 1700s or very early 1800s. This stone reads, "Hier ruhet// Magdalena Kell// erin ist gestor// ben den 24 Iulius// 1805 Sie wahr alt// etwa 40 Iahr." Loosely translated, the inscription is "Here rests Magdalena Keller, died 24 July 1805. She was about 40 years old."

I took this photograph shortly before leaving Maryland in 2004. I grabbed my camera and drove to Middletown to photograph tombstones of the Shafer families and its allies, but couldn't resist a few extra photos. I took about ninety photos in this cemetery and uploaded the bunch to my Flickr site in a set called "Christ Reformed Cemetery, Middletown, Maryland." If you don't include Flickr in your tombstone searches, you may be missing a treasure. Flickr is tagged by its users, so you may need to be creative in searching the site for cemeteries and tombstones, but you should also be aware of some Flickr groups dedicated to tombstone photographs, especially "Graves of Veterans of the American Civil War" and the "Find A Grave" group.

My ninety photos from the Christ Reformed Cemetery pale when compared to the 775 residing on Find A Grave. Magdalena Keller's tombstone photo is here, but the person who created the memorial was apparently unfamiliar with the German language. She appears as "Ruthet Magdalena Kellerin." The transcriber misread the word Ruhet [rests] as a given name, and he was unfamiliar with the old naming convention in which the suffix -in was added to create the feminine surname form.

What other sites do you routinely include in your search for tombstone photographs, cemetery transcriptions, and burial records? Make sure you add Flickr to the list.

Fix-It Friday: Who was the Wife of David Bean?

When my daughter was about four years old, she got very upset about a grocery store tabloid story about an alien's baby with two heads - or some such thing. I tried to explain that it wasn't true, and she said, "Mommy, if it's not true, then they shouldn't be allowed to print it!" Although we're consciously aware that not everything we read is true, our subconscious seems to echo my daughter. "It must be true. I read it in a book, or on line, or saw it on TV." And we all know that once something appears in print, it develops a life of its own. Correcting it is almost impossible. Genealogists have an even bigger problem. We publish the results of our research, and even though we may feel we have done a reasonably thorough job of searching the best sources, we know that new evidence may appear that invalidates our conclusions.

Unless we've published the material ourselves, we have limited means to posit a correction. In fact, our "correction" is only another conclusion based on what we consider best evidence. Here is a fix-it for the identity of Abigail, wife of David Bean, of Wheelock, Vermont.

The memorial for Abigail Bean, who is buried in South Wheelock Cemetery, can be found on Find A Grave. The information provided calls her Abigail (Stephens) Bean, born 1808 and died Dec. 30, 1861. The inscription is noted as including "w/o David," and there is a note, "Married in Kirby Dec. 3, 1848." There is no tombstone photograph. When I saw this, I immediately said, "Oh, no! I must have made a mistake! I thought David Bean's wife was Abigail Ward. What is my source?" I still think Abigail, wife of David Bean of Wheelock, Vermont, is Abigail Ward, daughter of Samuel and Tamson (Hall) Ward. Here are some highlights from my evidence.

1. Abigail's tombstone in South Wheelock Cemetery reads, "Abigail// wife of// David Bean// died// Dec. 30, 1861// ae 52 yrs". No help there for either the Stephens school or the Ward school.

2. There is a death record for Abigail Bean in Wheelock, Vermont, Vital Statistics 1: 89. It states that Abigail Bean died 30 December 1861, age age 52 years 4 months 15 days; cause of death, heart disease. She was married and her parents are recorded as "Abigail and Tamson Ward." Sometimes, things just aren't easy. This is the only entry in the entire volume that lists a female name first in the parents column, and it's definitely the only entry that records two female names in this column! I think the recorder simply repeated Abigail's name without thinking about it. Tamson Ward, widow of Samuel Ward, was still living in the area, either in Danville with son Samuel H., or in Wheelock with daughter Mary (Ward) Sherburn. Her husband, though, had died 26 years earlier, so a slip on his name is more likely than a slip on Tamson's. No informant appears in these records.

3. I have found no marriage record for David Bean and Abigail Ward, and their only son's marriage and death records don't give his mother's maiden name. However, that son, William W., was a Civil War soldier. His pension file contains several affidavits from members of Abigail Ward's family, none from any Stephens family.

4. Janice Boyko's wonderful site, Northeast Kingdom Genealogy, contains birth, death, and marriage announcements found in area newspapers. Two of them, the St. Johnsbury Caledonian and the Danville North Star, contain the announcement of the marriage of Reuben Bean Jr. of Kirby to Abigail Stephens of Kirby, 3 December 1848, in Kirby. I haven't seen the original newspapers.

5. David, Abigail, and William W. Bean are enumerated in Wheelock, Vermont, in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses. The household of Reuben and Abigail Bean is enumerated in Kirby, Vermont in the same census years. In 1850, Reuben is called Reuben Jr. and his household follows that of his probable father, also called Reuben. In 1860, the Reuben and Abigail Bean family is enumerated in the household of William Stevens, a man of an age to be Abigail's father.

Thus, my fix-it for the day: Abigail, wife of David Bean of Wheelock, Vermont, is Abigail Ward, daughter of Samuel and Tamson (Hall) Ward. Abigail Stephens, on the other hand, married Reuben Bean Jr., of Kirby, Vermont. If you're interested in any of these families, you can now judge the evidence.

Online Cemeteries in a New Light (Part One)

Elizabeth Shown Mills once said, "If you are frustrated by record losses and tired of 'spinning wheels,' perhaps what you really need are some new ideas for dealing with those records you have managed to find already!" I love this statement. It's especially important to remember when the "repository" you use most often is the Internet.

Our access to many online records is via a name search only. This always makes me a little nervous. I always have this feeling that the record I need is hiding just a keystroke away - and I haven't found the right key. If I play with the online data, though, sometimes patterns appear, and the information I need to solve a problem becomes apparent.

There are many online cemetery databases for those of us who live too far away to visit, but access to almost all of them begins - and ends - with a name search. You find the person, you say, "Hurray!" and you enter the info, along with the source, in your genealogy database. If you were visiting the cemetery, though, what would you do? You would transcribe or photograph the tombstone, note its location in the cemetery, and search the neighboring tombstones for other possible family members. In the process, you might locate married daughters, in-laws, and siblings. If there were a cemetery office, you would visit this and obtain information on the lot(s), owners, dates of sale, and perhaps even copies of death certificates and obituaries. Access to this additional information is via cemetery section and lot number, not name. Although some online cemetery sources include this information, searching and sorting on any criterion but name is not easy. Here are some examples that show the importance of examining online data patterns.

1. You're looking for Philip Case, born about 1810, who lived most of his adult life in Ithaca, New York. Since you don't know the cemetery in which he's buried, you search Find A Grave. There, you find a likely candidate buried in the Ithaca City Cemetery. The entry includes a tombstone photo and links to entries for two wives and a daughter - all of them referencing the same tombstone. Of course, you next search the Ithaca City Cemetery listing for all Case burials, as well as Minton and Covert burials (his wives' maiden names), and you pick up one more Case name referencing the same tombstone and one additional Covert burial.

Many people stop here, but Find A Grave is not the only cemetery source online. A Google search for "Ithaca City Cemetery" provides links to the Tompkins County, New York, USGenWeb site. Here, you discover that this is a sixteen-acre cemetery, its first burial was about 1790 or 1791, and it's still in use. This GenWeb group is updating the cemetery's listing and adding some excellent tombstone photos. Unfortunately, access is still via surname, and the C's and M's have not been entered. Google also gives a link to the Ithaca City Cemetery records. Here you discover that the Ithaca City Clerk is partnering with Names In Stone to provide cemetery records.

Although Names In Stone does not provide a means to search records by cemetery section and lot, it does provide a burial map. Take a look at what information this yields: a previously unknown person, Luther T. Nelson, is buried in the Case lot! A return to Find A Grave uncovers a little more information and the fact that Luther's inscription is on the same Case tombstone. How exciting! Who is he? After a lot of additional research, you learn that Luther T. Nelson and Philip Case are first cousins once removed, and you've confirmed several previously undocumented relationships and explained some mysterious references in old family records. It all began with a web site that let you look at data in a different way.

My next post will show another method of looking at online cemetery data. Hint: Do you Excel?

The Democratization of Sources

There were many presentations at the SoCal Genealogy Jamboree that announced new web sites, or new developments in existing web sites, that would feature the Web 2.0 concept. I may use computers all the time, but sometimes Web 2.0 technospeak confounds my understanding, so I definitely wanted to hear at least one of these talks. The one I attended seemed a little premature, as the site does not seem to be in beta state, yet; but the speaker presented some very thought-provoking ideas. I'm not sure I'm ready to jump on the bandwagon.

The goal, the speaker said, was to provide access to all the world's records - admirable, of course - and to allow users to interact with these records: the "democratization of sources." This interaction, he said, might lead to "chaos," but it might lead to the "harnessing of the wisdom of the crowds." I had never heard the term, democratization of sources. We all know that all sources are not equal! When I got home, I Googled the term. There were a few entries, most of them referring to the ability we now have to obtain information from many sources, not just those approved by authority. It's a given that genealogists should look for all sources in our research. Just because we have a death certificate doesn't mean we don't need to look for an obituary or a tombstone. Just because we have a pension record doesn't mean we no longer need to look at a muster roll or a day book. Several undocumented million-name family trees, however, really don't add anything to our knowledge of an ancestor. Something told me I didn't understand the speaker's use of this term.

When I Googled the term democratization of information, I found this post, Web UI Platforms through Javascript sandboxes. If you avoid the technospeak, it's an interesting article, and I'm sure it's what the speaker meant when he referred to democratization of sources. "The users of these data make the data better." This isn't a new concept in genealogy web sites. Footnote has been doing this for some time. Original records can be annotated; links identifying an individual in multiple records can be created; original documents and pictures can be uploaded and linked to original records; and personal pages can be created. The Footnote user adding data is always identified - and there is a clear separation between the original record and the added material. The farther a genealogist strays from the original record, the more likely it is that errors creep into the family history. We all need reminders that our conclusions should be based on what a document really said, not on what someone else thought it said. And of course, what a document meant in the 18th century might not be what our 21st century mind inferred.

Find A Grave was one of my favorite sites when searching for tombstones. This web site is based on user contributions. When those contributions were tombstone photos and inscriptions, this site was wonderful. Some users, however, began competing to improve their statistics. When this happens, the quality of the contributions can diminish. Material was plagiarized, duplication was rampant, and copyright laws were violated. In fairness to the people at Find A Grave, they state that submissions must be the original property of the submitter, and they always remove material in violation of this policy. That must be a constant effort on their part! The site has always had problems clearly differentiating between what a tombstone said and what the submitter inferred, and the recent addition of family links and maiden names to the material has considerably increased the error to information rate. Sometimes, the "wisdom of the crowds" isn't so wise.

These two examples illustrate the possibilities and the limitations in the concept of democratization of information. Although Footnote's user contributions have added value to the site's data, access to the added material is still haphazard. Without user contributions, Find A Grave would not really exist, but the quality of material is often questionable. How does a site facilitate access to all data, maintain quality, yet encourage quantity?