Product Description

Your Guide to Cemetery Research is a comprehensive, in-depth resource that's perfect for genealogists, researchers and historians. It covers everything from cemetery and death-related terminology to clues offered by headstone art, and cemeteries' role in our culture and history.

This guide also examines the funeral customs of various ethnic groups and includes a social history of death that reveals both the usual and unusual ways in which readers' ancestors coped with and celebrated death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42346 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Library Journal
Slogging through graveyards armed with a camera and notepad may sound morbid, but it is high adventure to most genealogists. Indeed, according to Carmack (Organizing Your Family History Search), cemetery research provides valuable information about the dearly departed, and it can actually become a family tradition. Carmack begins her demystification of the process with a discussion of the various records created at the time of death (death certificates, funeral home records, and more) and the task of locating an ancestor's grave or cemetery. Once a burial site is established, a visit to the cemetery is in order. Carmack details the different kinds of cemeteries, grave decorations, and veterans' markers and explains the benefits of analyzing a cemetery's "community." A very helpful chapter on capturing a tombstone's information follows. Carmack covers American burial customs and the value (and pitfalls) of cemetery transcription and preservation projects. Finally, she offers ways to make cemetery visits a family affair. Examples of the artwork, epitaphs, and poetry found on tombstones are provided, as are an appendix of symbols and their meanings, a historical time line of America's epidemics and disasters, and a medical glossary. Genealogists and local historians of all stripes will find this book invaluable. Highly recommended for public and genealogy libraries. Elaine M. Kuhn, Allen Cty. P.L., Ft. Wayne,
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Carmack, a noted genealogist and an admitted cemetery addict, addresses a specialized area of genealogical research that can yield a wealth of historical and ancestral information. To locate an ancestor's final resting place, one must be thoroughly familiar with American death records. After explaining how to access and interpret coroner's records, death certificates, obituaries, wills, prayer and memorial cards, funeral home records, and mortality schedules, the author outlines the often less-than-straightforward process of locating elusive cemeteries and individual graves. Also included are a discussion of American burial customs and an analysis of cemetery artwork and epitaphs. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Sharon DeBartolo Carmack is a Certified Genealogist and the editor of Betterway genealogy books. She is the author of several books including A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Immigrant & Ethnic Ancestors, A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Female Ancestors, and Organizing Your Family History Search.

Customer Reviews

Helpful tips, great information
I love this book. Helpful for the geneaologist as well as the cemetery lover. Great tips on preserving tombstones, care of them, and researching those interred. Very helpful.

The Pleasure of being a 'Placophile' .
This book on tombstone research isn't perfect.Yet,it is one of the most popular and facilitative ones around.The design styles and marking patterns reveal much about when the stone was cut and their popularity for their day.In the old days,cemeteries were places were the family gathered for Sunday picnics and honored the lives of their forefathers.Inscriptions were witticisms and caveats to living,reminders for the mourners.God's acre ,the final resting place for the deceased.This book offers the reader great insight into what the novice researcher should look for.The meanings behind the symbols.Among stonecutters of yesteryear,their was an understood secretive code for the intombed and interred. For example,a 'lamb' indicated the passing of a child and with a 'half-moon' indicated it was a second-bourne child.Another example,upside-down torches connoted a ceasation of a family line,with no further namesake to carry the surname.Hour-glasses and skull headstones were popular during the seventeenth century,and has a renaissance of popularity among some of today's taphaphiles.Many of the headstones of twentith century became rather mundane.With the linear belief of modern monotheistic mankind,an after-life or the idea of rebirth, was seen as nonsense.Elaborate tombstones and sepulchral sarcophaguses are still the best way to honor the lives of the parted and praise for the good.These cenotaphs for the missing perished ones,bone-chambers of the deceased and grave-plaques of the buried; are earthly reminders of "who" our ancestors were before us.This book is one of the best to help the living ,respectfully chart and navigate around the addresses of the hallowed necropolis.

Excellent book for cemetery enthusiasts and genealogists alike
This is the book I recommend to everyone who takes my Cemetery Art classes. There is information on how to use cemeteries as research, how to research cemeteries, how to perform gravestone rubbings properly, how to even make a cast of a gravestone, gravestone symbolism and so much more. It's the best book on cemetery research I've come across. Sharon's writing is friendly and inviting. This is a MUST!