Full Circle of Living and Dying Volunteers
tending graves at Cherokee Cemetery, a natural green burial cemetery in Nevada County, CA |
Field Trip Event: "Filling in the Plot Family History Story, Poetry Reading, and
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Historic Cemetery Research:
If you’re like our March field trip presenter, Lisa Redfern, you’re curious about the people under time-faded headstones. We asked her to retrace her steps to reclaiming lost stories so you can fill in your own plot questions for cemeteries anywhere in Nevada County.
1. Find Your Family
Visit Find-A-Grave, Rough And Ready Cemetery
Click on à MEMORIALS “531 added (91% photographed).”
Scroll through the pages clicking on interesting links. Many individual grave pages include family members, parents, spouses, and siblings as well as obituaries.
2. Build A Tree
Once you’ve identified a family or group you want to explore, note their names and birth and death dates. Head over to your favorite family tree building website. Lisa’s two go-to’s are Ancestry and Family Search.
Build a family tree for your research subjects.
EASY: Give the platform algorithms time to call up documents related to them.
ADVANCED: Drill into targeted databases and page through unindexed documents.
3. Newspaper Clippings
To breathe more life and character into your historic narrative, round out your research with newspaper articles.
Newspapers.com is one of Lisa’s favorite tools. Searching and saving on this platform is easy, but it requires a paid subscription. If you’re looking for California history, the California Digital Newspaper Collection is a free resource from the California State Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It includes digitized California newspapers from 1846-present. Searches there will often bring up captivating results!
Start Your Own Research Project
To begin your own research project, start with this Nevada county Cemetery Records web page.
If you’re like our March field trip presenter, Lisa Redfern, you’re curious about the people under time-faded headstones. We asked her to retrace her steps to reclaiming lost stories so you can fill in your own plot questions for cemeteries anywhere in Nevada County.
1. Find Your Family
Visit Find-A-Grave, Rough And Ready Cemetery
Click on à MEMORIALS “531 added (91% photographed).”
Scroll through the pages clicking on interesting links. Many individual grave pages include family members, parents, spouses, and siblings as well as obituaries.
2. Build A Tree
Once you’ve identified a family or group you want to explore, note their names and birth and death dates. Head over to your favorite family tree building website. Lisa’s two go-to’s are Ancestry and Family Search.
Build a family tree for your research subjects.
EASY: Give the platform algorithms time to call up documents related to them.
ADVANCED: Drill into targeted databases and page through unindexed documents.
3. Newspaper Clippings
To breathe more life and character into your historic narrative, round out your research with newspaper articles.
Newspapers.com is one of Lisa’s favorite tools. Searching and saving on this platform is easy, but it requires a paid subscription. If you’re looking for California history, the California Digital Newspaper Collection is a free resource from the California State Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It includes digitized California newspapers from 1846-present. Searches there will often bring up captivating results!
Start Your Own Research Project
To begin your own research project, start with this Nevada county Cemetery Records web page.