Working in Find A Grave

This past week I have spent my family history research time in Find A Grave.  

I ran a report out of my Roots Magic system that showed all those with a death fact and no burial fact.  Then I ran a report for all those with a burial fact which I exported to Excel where I then ran a comparison against a  list of people with a Find A Grave source.  After removing those that had a Find A Grave source I then combined the two lists.  That gave me my work list for Find A Grave.

This weeks research time was spent searching Find A Grave for people on that list.  I found memorial pages for 18 people and only 4 people searched with no pages found.  Also most of the memorial pages had tombstone photos added.  So far so good.  

This next week I hope to spend more time on research and less on indexing.  I really only spent one afternoon this past week on research.  I did more indexing this week than I originally planned to do.  Got caught up in the flow.  Also, I now have my work process flow established and a good Evernote template as well as a source template setup in Roots Magic so that should speed up the process.

Summers coming to an end, hoping to get restarted on genealogy

It has been an exceedingly busy summer for me.  I have spent a lot of time on non family history volunteer activities.  However, these are activities I really enjoy and would recommend them to all who like genealogy.  The major thing's I've been doing:

1.  RECORD INDEXING - Even though I am not a Mormon (LDS) I do enjoy indexing records for Family Search.  I've especially enjoyed working on the various obituary collections they are doing this year.

2.  CEMETERY VOLUNTEER - A local cemetery, Clinton Memory Gardens, has been changed to a not for profit cemetery and renamed to Vansant Road Cemetery.  I am currently serving as President of the board of directors.  We have a lot of work to do at the cemetery.  It was not in good shape.  Lot's of grounds cleanup and record maintenance to do.  This has been a very time consuming effort.

3.  VACATION - My wife and I took her brothers ashes to Arlington National Cemetery for inurnment.  This was combined with this years vacation.  Spent some time in Virginia and the Carolina's.

I am currently wrapping up a couple of major projects that I've been working on for the cemetery.  It is my hope that by early next week I will be able to restart my genealogy research again.

I've decided that once restarted I will focus on missing burial records.  The first step will be to check all deceased against Find A Grave.  My thinking is that if I can locate the burial place I will know where to search for obituaries and death certificates.  For the first pass I will create a Roots Magic report listing all people with a death fact and no burial fact.  Once that is worked I will then create a report for all burial facts with no sources.  I've not looked at this yet so I'm not sure how to create thsi report.