RM Jones’ Adventure

My website www.RM-Jones.com has been rewritten to allow visitors faster access to the information that it provides. After communication with a number of people, I decided that most people that visit the site are looking for information, not there to see the “Pretty” layout. I have rewritten it to remove most, if not all, of the “Pretty” heading , photo albums on the pages, etc. If you would like to see my photos and photo albums there is a page for that. If not, you don’t have to suffer through a long download time for something that you don’t want to see anyway.

The main reason for the rewrite was to make it easier and faster to provide links to the photos of the Cemeteries and headstones when I take them. I still hadn’t gotten to all the headstones that I took in Glendale Cemetery in Le Claire, Iowa last summer. I figured out a way to upload the headstones and provide one link to the page of photos. You simply have to check the data file to find the person you are looking for and remember the number. This is much easier for me and much faster access to the photos for the visitor. No months of waiting for me to finally take the time to provide links to each and every photo one at a time. (more…)

Thanks for stopping back to visit. As you remember, in part one we discussed some of the problems in indexing a cemetery. In part two we talked about the process I actually went through while indexing the Glendale Cemetery in Le Claire, Iowa. And in part three we covered cleaning and photographing the headstones. Now in this part I’ll tell you about some of the other small “Old” cemeteries we also did this year.

After we completed the Glendale Cemetery I decided to do the same thing to some of the small cemeteries in this area. To start with there are two more in Le Claire, Iowa and two in Argo which is about five miles west of us. I decided to start with the two in Argo since I have some ancestors in one of them.

The two cemeteries in Argo, Iowa are the “Argo Cemetery” and the “Le Claire Prairie Cemetery” . Both are very old. The Le Claire Prairie Cemetery was started March 22, 1887. It is right in the town of Argo and got its name for the original church, The Le Claire Prairie Church, that was across the street. It is now the “Our Savior Presbyterian Church”. I’m not sure when the Argo Cemetery began because I haven’t been able to find the records for it. The person that had them died and at this time no one seems to know where they are. This means that no one else can be buried there since they don’t have a record of what plots have been used.

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Thanks for stopping back to visit. As you remember, in part one we discussed some of the problems in indexing a cemetery. In part two we talked about the process I actually went through while indexing the Glendale Cemetery in Le Claire, Iowa. Now in this part I’ll tell you the process we went through to clean and photograph the headstones and monuments and check my data file.

First let me tell you something my Beautiful and Usually Charming wife found very funny. I am one of those rather impatient (some would say obnoxious) people that wants things done my way and fast. Sometimes I create BIG problems for myself when I let this poor behavior flaw come to the front without thinking about the consequences. The first day out to take photos we were trying to develop a system that would speed things up so we wouldn’t have to spend the rest of our lives out there. Let me tell you, at that time that cemetery looked awfully big. Anyway, things weren’t going like I wanted them to. We tried a lot of different systems but nothing seemed to be as fast as I wanted it to be. I THOUGHT I could probably do it as least as fast by myself, so why have my wife spend her time out there to. The problem is my Beautiful and Usually Charming wife likes to help whenever she can. I had to convince her that I didn’t really NEED her to spend her days in the cemetery with me. (more…)

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. (more…)

I have been attempting Genealogy (notice I said attempting not doing) for a number of years. One thing I noticed when looking at information other people had put together, was the differences from one to the other for the same family member. I think this must be due to records that other people created from word of mouth information or inaccurate records in things like family Bibles and note books. I’m sure that the people compiling the data did the best they could with the information they had to work with.A few years ago I was trying to think of a way I could help others get the correct information for people that had lived in this area. One of the requirements would be to supply them with a copy of the actual records. You know how things go, the important ones get put off and the fun stuff gets done. I’m no different, until last year. Last year I decided to locate the records for the cemeteries in Le Claire, Iowa (the town I live in) and put them on the internet along with documenting photographs. That was a lot easier said than done, let me tell you.

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