COGenBlog

It’s Halloween and what genealogist doesn’t like a nice visit to the cemetery. I recently initiated my grandsons, Jakob and John, in the joys of visiting a cemetery. We went on a hunt to find their 3rd great grandparents tombstones at the Stromsburg Cemetery in Polk County, Nebraska . My two children never appreciated these visits to cemeteries when they were small but my grandsons seemed to have a great time. Maybe the cemetery gene just skipped a generation.

If you can’t make it to a cemetery in person this Halloween, you may want to take a virtual cemetery trip through the Internet. Below are some Web sites with Colorado cemetery information.

US GenWeb Colorado Cemetery Transcription Project

US GenWeb Colorado Tombstone Photo Project

Interment.net (Colorado)

Cemetery Junction (Colorado)

Find A Grave (Colorado)

I Dream of Genealogy (Colorado)

Access Genealogy (Colorado)

The Political Graveyard (Colorado)

If an online trip doesn’t satisfy your cemetery addiction, you might consider helping with the Cemetery Location Project of the Colorado Council of Genealogical Societies (CCGS). Volunteers for the project visit Colorado cemeteries, take the GPS reading, and confirm the cemetery’s name. CCGS has purchased several GPS systems for the project. Contact Duane Kniebes at dkniebes@localnet.com for more information and to volunteer.

Happy Halloween!

Lee Zion, COGenWeb Colorado Places By County Webmaster, has announced that the project pages have moved to a new URL. Colorado Places By County is a directory of Colorado place names. The directory provides the county in which the place exists or existed, years the place existed, and other related remarks. The authors have attempted to include every settlement, trading post, military post, mining camp, ghost town, stage station, railroad stop, post office, rural community, town and city from the earliest known into the present.

The following example is a typical entry:

The new address is — www.rootsweb.com/~coplaces/

Julie Miller’s monthly column is in the 8 July 2006 edition of the Broomfield Enterprise. The topic for July is Effective Use of Libraries (and other repositories). The article provides five practical tips on the use of repositories. It also lists several Colorado repositories that can be useful for genealogy research.

The Gold Bug, developers of the popular AniMap software, have made their SiteFinder database available online in a “mashup”* with the Google Maps service. This can be useful to genealogists for quickly visualizing locations of geographical or manmade features. For instance, you can search for a place by name (the following will show four locations):

Place name contains the word(s): Niwot
State: Colorado

Or search for places by type — the following finds the locations of twelve cemeteries:

County: Boulder
Type: Cemetery
State: Colorado

Here is a piece of the map generated by the above Boulder County cemetery query:

Thanks to Genealogy Websites I Don’t Hate for this tip.

* Originally a term for mixing tracks from different musical recordings, a mashup can also be a “website or web application that combines content from more than one source.” — Wikipedia

If you have tried to comment in the past, you were probably unsuccessful. The blog settings have been adjusted in an attempt to fix the problem. You can find instructions by clicking “Comments?” at the top of any page. We would like to receive your comments so we encourage you to try again.