Recently, says Johnson, a woman in California put in a photo request for her grandparents’ grave in the New Paltz Rural Cemetery. Johnson went out the same day and took the photograph, uploaded it and within an hour had received a thank-you from the gratified woman, who had never been able to see her grandparents’ gravesite before.
Johnson is interested in encouraging new volunteers to help upload photographs of graves and headstones to FindaGrave.com, whether it’s someone seeing a beautiful headstone and taking a picture of it to upload, or someone focused on contributing photographs of a single family. Memorials on the “Find a Grave” website may contain pictures and biographies or more specific information, and members can leave remembrances via “virtual flowers” on the memorials that they visit. Membership is free, and visitors only have to register to contribute information; one can simply search the site without signing up.
The website was founded in 1995 by self-described “nerd” Jim Tipton, who was unable to find information online at the time to satisfy his hobby of searching out the graves of famous people. Since then, the site still offers information on the graves of celebrities, but also serves the wider function of helping millions of people research their ancestry. The site gets five million hits a day, says Johnson, and more than 800,000 people contribute to its archives. E-mail addresses remain private and are not sold.
The resources of the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at the Elting Memorial Library include a public computer for genealogical purposes and access to online subscription databases and websites, including Ancestry.com. For a nominal fee, microfilms from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City can be ordered and viewed. Founded in 1894, the Family History Library is the largest facility of its kind in the world, featuring more than 3 million genealogical records from over 110 countries.
The extensive collection of indexed Hudson Valley records, from Ulster, Dutchess, Orange, Greene, Columbia, Putnam and Sullivan as well as miscellaneous other counties, includes maps and atlases; obituaries, birth and marriage announcements from 1860 forward; census records; genealogy on Hudson Valley families; vertical files with newspaper clippings and ephemera related to local families and organizations; an extensive collection of materials relating to the history and architecture of the houses, farms and commercial buildings within New Paltz; locally published magazines, newsletters and yearbooks; photographs, slides and postcards dating from the late 19th century; biographical information on approximately 2,000 New York State families; and special collections including account books, invoices and business ledgers from the Minnewaska hotels, the Pine Funeral Home records, Civil War letters, deeds, diaries, family papers and records of local clubs and organizations.
