Back in business !!

The Beallsville cemetery website is back in business !! I have completed the transfer to a public web hosting service. If anyone finds any links that were broken in the transfer please let me know. Thanks for you patience and for the emails wondering where the site was. It is nice to know that it was missed. Now back to work loading pages !!

Beallsville Website still down

I am in the process of switching web hosting services for the Beallsville cemetery. I am extrememly thankful to the institution that hosted my site for free for the last three years but since it was an experimental server, there were several occasions when the site went down. I have decided to bite the bullet and pay for a public web hosting service to ensure that the website remains more stable. The switch is taking a little longer than I had anticipated but we are getting closer. Thank you for your patience and I hope to have the site up and running soon with several more new pages of information.

Beallsville Cemetery website down

Hi All,
The Beallsville Cemetery website has been down since yesterday afternoon and I'm not sure when it will be back up. It appears that the server that housed it didn't take too kindly to an upgrade and the whole website was lost. Not to panic (at least I hope not). I have a copy on my computer and once the server is fixed or rebuilt, we will upload the whole site from my computer and will hopefully be back in business. Just to be safe, I think I will make and additional backup tonight when I'm done working on it in case my computer decides to konk out at the same time. Then it would be time to panic !!

Thanks for your patience and we'll be back in business soon.

Been away for a while

Sorry I've let my postings slip lately. I've been taking advantage of the all this wonderfull fall weather and taking trips down to Beallsville on as many Saturday's as I can ato try to finish mapping and photographing the L section of Beallsville Cemetery so that I have lots to work on during the winter. I just got back from 5 hours under clear blue skies with my tombstone buddy (my dog Zeppelin).

I only have about 10 rows to map.

I've also been using the microfilm of the Washington county Death records that I ordered at the local Family History Center Library to pull names and information for people buried in Beallsville, Taylor, Scenery Hill, Westland, Buckingham, Millsboro and the Hill Cemeteries. Once I have that finished and the database built, I will be posting that as well.

New section of Beallsville Cemetery

The last few weekends in Pittsburgh have been beautiful so I did what any logical person would do - and spent them in the cemetery ! I mapped section K and have started to post those plotmaps and photos to the Beallsville Cemetery website. I am also almost done posting the BC section. I've started to arrange the photos for the L section but still have to go back a few times to the cemetery in order to draw the plotmaps. I was saddend to see some of the very old stones in the oldest section of the cemetery have broken in half or have been damaged by the weather, and some of the other stones in other section that were in danger of tipping over due to sunken graves, have finally fallen. This makes me even more grateful that I was able to get photographs of these before these thing happened.

On the whole the cemetery looked very nice - grass mowed and trimmed, veteran flags up, bushes that had started to grow out of control have been trimmed way back so you can see some of the tombstones they were hiding. They are trying so hard to take care of this large cemetery on a very small budget so I am always thankful to them for caring so much about what they do.

I still have more information to post here to the blog so stay tuned !

Contacting me

I've noticed that it is difficult to actually communicate with each other via the blog format so if anyone wants to get in touch with me directly, you can email me at djhday@gmail.com.

Another day in the cemetery

I spent about 5 1/2 hours in Beallsville Cemetery today trying to retake photos that were not good the first time around, taking ones that I had missed and finding new stones that had been placed since the last time I was there. It rained the whole time and my camera battery decided that today was good time to start to give out after less than 100 photos. I had to take the last 4 photos with my cell phone which didn't work all that great. Needless to say I didn't get quite as much done as I had hoped but I am only about 10 photos short of finishing up the BC section.

I have also loaded all of the photos that I had taken at Taylor Cemetery last weekend. I was trying to get as many taken as possible so I was not paying much attention to writing down the names and dates. After I had a chance to see the photos, I know that I need to go back and double check the information. There are still many discrepancies between the 1976 listings, 1937 listings and what I think I see in the photos. This may have to wait until the spring but at least this is a start.

Postings may slow down a bit now this fall since I am taking 2 classes instead of one as originally planned plus working full time. I will try to keep up with getting new things put online as often as I can. Thank you again to everyone who takes the time to check in on the blog and the Beallsville Cemetery website. And thank you too to everyone who has sent photos, obituaries, family information to be included in these two endeavors !!