Beallsville Cemetery and Washington County PA Genealogy Research Blog: 2009

Friday, December 4, 2009

New addition to website

I have been looking at the microfilmed Washington County Death records that I had ordered at the local LDS Family History Center. I have been transcribing the deaths for people that are buried in the following cemeteries: Beallsville, Scenery Hill, Westland, Taylor, Buckingham, Millsboro. I have finished transcribing Volume one which covers 1893 - 1900. I have posted it to the www.beallsvillecemetery.org website under "Death Records" at the bottom of the right hand side of the main page. I'm working on Volume two and should have that done before Christmas.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

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 !!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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 !

Saturday, September 12, 2009

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.

Monday, September 7, 2009

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 !!

Saturday, September 5, 2009

May Elizabeth Zimmerman obituary

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G. Raymond Zimmerman obituary

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Irene Howell Moore obituary

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William B. Hill obituary

Death Roll - Feb 2, 1931 - John L. tombaugh, Theodore Landefeld

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Death Roll Jan 9, 1931 - Ray R. Buckingham, Samuel McCann, Jackson L. Shape

click on image to enlarge

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Trip to Washington for more photos

I spent Sunday in the Beallsville Cemetery and Taylor cemetery taking as many photos of tombstones as I could before the battery on my digital camera gave out (got in about 300 photos). This should give me some more things to work on getting loaded on to the website this winter. I am hoping to make another trip down before winter however, my classes start this week and I'm not sure how much more time I will have before the snow flies to get back to Washington.

I re-took several photos in Beallsville that were either not of good quality the first time, had new dates and names added since the last time I was there, or that I was missing for some reason.

I also spent some time in Taylor Cemetery using the 1976 listing of burials as my guide and started at the beginning of row 1 taking photos. I actually found the listing to be quite acurate in terms of the order of burials in the rows. It is also good to know that the listing was done 33 years ago because some of the stones are no longer legible, have been damaged by the elements or are missing.

I have posted several new Taylor tombstone photos to the website so please check them out.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

website back up

Good News ! The Beallsville Cemetery website is back up and running. I have added a partial listing of the burials in Taylor Cemetery. I will be adding more to that listing after I take a trip down to Washington to take more photographs so that I can document the listings from 1937 and from 1976 or else add to that from more recent stones or from sections that were not covered in those listings.

I also want to get back to adding photographs to the Beallsville pages of the website and eventually add photos and listings from other cemeteries that I have visited.

I will also be adding more scanned images to this blog too. So much to do and so little time !!

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Beallsville Website down

I just wanted to let you know that the Beallsville Cemetery website is down temporarily. There was some maintenance done on the server earlier in the week and it didn't reconnect to the network. It should be up and running again on Monday sometime. I have been adding a listing of burials for Taylor Cemetery along with many tombstone photographs that I've taken there.

At least once this fall before the weather turns bad, I'm planning a trip down to Beallsville to do a massive "photo shoot" and try to get as many more tombstone photos and transcriptions done in several cemeteries as is humanly possible in one day and I'm dragging my husband along to help. That should keep me busy for the winter getting those all posted to the website and blog.

I also have some more photo albums from my grandfather that I want to scan. I seem to be missing a whole group of obituaries that I have transcribed copies for but didn't find the originals in the last batch of scrapbooks so there must be one that I missed in the many, many boxes of family records. I'll be on the lookout for that as well.

As always, if anyone has anything that they would like to contribute to either this general Washington County Blog or to the Beallsville Cemetery website (which is growing to encompass several other area cemeteries) I'm happy to post your contributions. Many people have sent me wonderful old photos of ancestors buried in Beallsville along with obituaries, family connections, etc. These things have added greatly to the deapth of information on the website and helps to make the site more personal instead of just a collection of names and dates. Thanks to everyone who has sent items in !!

Bye for now.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Taking a break

Hi Everyone,
I hope you've been enjoying the postings that I've been doing for the past month or so. I'm going to take a break from this for a while to compile a burial listing from Taylor Cemetery in West Brownsville, Washington Co. This listing will be a combination of two listings that were done previously - one in 1937 about a year after a tornado badly damaged the Taylor Methodist Church and the huge McCutchin monument that was in Taylor Cemetery, and the second listing which was done in 1976. It will also contain photographs of many stones that I took just a few years ago. This listing will be posted to the www.beallsvillecemetery.org website when it is done.

Once I've finished that, I'll get back here to post some more articles, obituaries, anniversaries, etc from Washington Co.

Deb