RM Jones’ Adventure

Hello again. As you remember, in the last post we were discussing the process I went through when I indexed the Glendale Cemetery in Le Claire, Iowa. A point of interest to some of you would be a little of the “Trivia” associated with that cemetery. The oldest recorded burial in Glendale Cemetery was Malinda Chamberlin in 1835. The person with the earliest recorded date of birth was Judith Danforth who was born in 1778. There are about 2558 people buried in the Glendale Cemetery. I thought this was interesting; there is one animal officially buried in the Glendale Cemetery. It was Waltimore Rathmann’s dog. It is listed as buried in the plot next to him. Waltimore lived from 8/3/1858 to 9/18/1944.

Now, on with the indexing of the Glendale Cemetery.As you remember from the previous posting I had found at least three types of records in the cemetery; the old records (which I didn’t use) the typed file cards and the compiled book. The first process was kind of easy (when compared to the rest) and I simply used one of their books which I scanned into my computer and used an OCR (optical character recognition) program to convert it to a Excel 2003 file. Now came the work. OCR programs do a good, but not perfect, job so I compared person by person, line by line, the Excel file to the original book. That took days. When that was done I made arrangements to photograph the file cards. That process only took a day and I want to thank the people at the Le Claire Glendale Cemetery for allowing me to do so. Those photographs are not for public use and are only being used by me to compile and check records.

Now for the REAL work. I compared each card to my compiled Excel file. The file cards added a little more information and answered a few questions. That took over a week to complete. The process isn’t complete yet. Why? I still haven’t caught any errors that may have occurred when the original records were written. How am I going to catch those errors? Yep, compare them to the headstones and monuments in the cemetery. That’s next.

Now for the photographs. I got a plot map from the cemetery office and scanned it into my computer. Then, using that as a start I redrew the plot map to the same scale. That was a couple of days to complete. You can find the plot map, with the other records, at www.rm-jones.com if you’re interested. Using the plot map we, my Beautiful and Usually Charming Wife, set out for the cemetery. We started at one corner of a section (there are three sections in the Glendale Cemetery) and worked our way through the entire cemetery cleaning and photographing the headstones and monuments. As we completed a plot we marked it off the map to insure we took photos of them all. I’ll cover the work and problems involved it taking the photos in the next post.

Before I took the photos (yes, photos, I took more than one angle on many of the stones) of a headstone or monument I checked the information on the stone against the data file I had made. Did I find errors? You bet. Probably mostly mine but probably a few typos from when the file cards were made. The order of acceptance that I used was; first the cemetery book, if the file cards were different I considered the file cards correct as they were earlier than the book and most accurate of all was the headstones and monuments. They were considered as the “official” source for my data. As I took the photos the photo number for each headstone or monument was recorded on the data file printout. It took a couple of weeks to process the whole cemetery and it was VERY hot.

After we had worked our way through the whole cemetery I was VERY happy to return to my beautiful and caring computers, Tiger, R2-D2 and LapDancer (see an earlier article on my computer names if you are interested). I made the corrections to the Excel file. Was I done? Not by a long way. I still had to make sure that I caught any errors I had made when I was writing in the cemetery. It was hot, I was tired, I almost certainly made errors. Yep, I did. So, in a much nicer environment, I sat down and compared each photo to the Excel file data. I found some errors. One thing Great about working with the photos is if they are at a high resolution you can enlarge them and see things you can’t see when you look at the stone.

While comparing the photos I also updated the file to include the photo numbers for each person so I could later link the photo to it on the web.

I was done at last. I put the data file (as a graphics file) and the photos on Webshots.com for people to see and use. I’ll leave them there until I need the space for something else. I can take them down now since I have them, and much more, on my website www.rm-jones.com . I also gave a copy of the data file and photograph to the Le Claire Cemetery, the Genealogy and Historical Society of Le Claire Township, the Family History Center (LDS) in Davenport, Iowa and the Davenport Library Genealogy section.

In the next post I will go on with this series and discuss the way we cleaned the headstones and took the photos. It was a learn as you do process so if you know of better ways to get good photos please come back tomorrow and leave some comments and suggestions. I have a lot of cemeteries to go and any help you can supply would be greatly appreciated.

See You in a day or two
Bob Jones