Talk about a good samaritan! The Jamestown Sun has an article about Herb Schwede of Donnybrook, North Dakota. Schwede has documented about 70,000 gravesites from tombstone data that he's collected from visits to about 360 cemeteries between Towner and Montana, and Lake Sakakawea and Canada. He has documented a few cemeteries in eastern Montana and Minnesota. He posts his information online for use by genealogical researchers.
"What I get out of it is e-mails from all over the world," he said. "A lot of times I get on the computer and there's 50 e-mails."
You can read the full story in an article written by Jill Schramm at http://www.jamestownsun.com/event/article/id/120887/group/homepage/
Wouldn't it be nice if more people did this? Similar efforts, although usually not quite as big as Herb Schwede's project, are being coordinated at Find A Grave at http://www.findagrave.com/ as well as at Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (RAOGK) at http://www.raogk.org/
Wouldn't it be nice if every user of Find A Grave and of RAOGK could do the same for just one nearby cemetery? Or perhaps each reader of this newsletter could do the same? The result would be one of the largest databases of deceased individuals in existence.
