Sunday, September 27, 2020

I Have Been Misinformed

 Misinformed, hell! I done been lied to!

Picking cemeteries to audit is basically an exercise in triage. Locating them is only one part. Looking at location, access, and number of memorials all must be factored in. For example: There are two cemeteries within walking distance from Br'er's warren. However! One of them is a large, modern, commercial cemetery with thousands of graves. The other is relatively smaller with a few hundred graves. Neither is one that could be audited in a short period. But the latter could be done over the course of a long day or two. The former would take several weeks to audit. So if picking one or the other for an afternoon excursion, obviously the latter would win out.

Picking places for area audits generally means restricting the candidates to those with fewer than about 150 memorials. Usually the focus is on those the handfuls instead. And among those there are many that simply cannot be accessed. At least not without permission of property owners. Fenced yards and close quarters houses make access nigh on impossible.

Recently we set out to audit a cemetery with 4 memorials (only 1 of which had a grave photo in Find A Grave). Expectation was to find one or two markers in a small spot behind a church. 

That wasn't the reality.




Small cemetery? Yes. Four graves? Oh, hell no! There are closer to three score graves here! As the Marine nephew might put it, "Adjust fire!" Not doing a full audit here today. We have too many other places lined up to visit this day so a full audit will have to wait for another day.

I did update Find A Grave with a few memorials. Namely all the military markers, one of which appears to be a cenotaph for a WW I serviceman. I say appears. More research would be needed to confirm.



While all the memorials are not logged into Find A Grave, I did more than double the number in the system so honor has been satisfied.

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