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.

Apples and Fraktur

One of my college classmates loved to pontificate on any subject. He fascinated me, because I hadn't met too many people like him before those days. Of course, he irritated me a great deal, too. Over the years, though, one of his rambling commentaries has returned to mind many times - his "Apple Argument." He contended that most Americans had no idea what a wonderful thing an apple could be. The only apple we'd ever eaten was a Red Delicious, with an occasional adventure with a Jonathan or a Granny Smith. (This was in the days before most grocery stores added Gala and Fuji to their limited collection.) There were hundreds, if not thousands, of tastier apples in the country, but we never saw them because they didn't ship or store as well. Big business was destroying quality and variety in apples simply to make money. On the other hand, I replied, big business was providing people with inexpensive apples year round. That couldn't be all bad, could it? I'm not sure I agree with my early self now. How many of these apple varieties have you tasted? How many have you even heard of? Isn't there some way to have both quality and availability? And what does this have to do with genealogy?

Late last year, a controversial post by Peggy Reeves on the APG mailing list started a discussion that carried over to several other lists and blogs. Like Peggy, I have found missing records in many Ancestry databases, and we all have stories of horrendous indexing errors in all the major subscription databases. Many of the responses to Peggy's posts boiled down to this: "Okay, there may be problems, but we should be grateful for what we have. Look at how much better access is now to these records." True, but will we have access to these records if they're not digitized in the first place? Do we have access if there's no index or finding aid? How do you look at a record, if you can't find proof it exists?

I took comfort from the fact that the Archives would be there for us, but in gossiping with some of the reference people on my recent trip, I discovered that the Archives really is planning to retire digitized records from "active reference," and there are rumors of plans to replace the microfilm reading room at Archives I with a museum store. Microfilm, like text records, could be requested, but self-service rolls would be limited. Records no longer considered active reference could be requested, but usually only when your need to see the original is demonstrated. Consider also Peggy's comment that the companies digitizing NARA's records weren't even taking advantage of modern technology. That brings me to the fraktur in my title. If you can't look at the original, which image would you rather see? This fraktur image found on Footnote, or this image found on NARA's Flickr site?

Isn't there some way to have both quality and availability? Whose responsibility is it to see that we do?