TERRE HAUTE —
The Wabash Valley Genealogy Society’s Cemetery Committee will conduct an all-day cemetery restoration workshop on Saturday at the Smith Cemetery near Youngstown, Honey Creek Township, Vigo County, Ind. This event will start at 9:30 a.m. and last until 4 p.m. The cost to attend will be $10 for WVGS members and $15 for the general public. The class will be conducted by Brad Manzenberger of Stone Revival Historical Preservation.
This workshop has something for everyone, regardless of skill level. Tasks will include cleaning dirty stones, repairing broken stones with epoxy, resetting toppled stones, and photographing and recording stones.
The schedule of events includes: 9:30-10:30 lecture, demonstration, Q & A; 10:30-noon hands-on demonstrations, noon-12:30 lunch break, and 1-4 cleaning and resetting of gravestones.
The all-day event requires the participant to bring a lunch and some supplies. These include appropriate clothing, work gloves, lawn chair, hand cleaner, food and drink. Portable restrooms will be available at the site.
For more information, or to register for the workshop, visit the WVGS website at www.inwvgs.org, or contact Linda Gregory at (812)240-1405, email
genealogyrocks1n2n3@gmail.com, subject Smith Cemetery Restoration.
The WVGS will host a presentation entitled “A Grave Matter In Indiana,” from 6:30-8 p.m. May 14 at the Vigo County Public Library. Jeannie R. Regan-Dinius, director of special initiatives at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, will present the information.
The discussion will center on the continuing activities of the DNR as they relate to locating, documenting, and preserving Indiana’s pioneer cemeteries. The speaker will also review Indiana law as it pertains to our cemeteries. For more information on this program, visit the WVGS website at www.inwvgs.org.
The 1940 federal census is online at four separate sites. At this point, there is no search engine index for all surnames, although one is being developed. People wanting to get an early jump on finding their ancestors have to know where they lived in 1940 and then do a search through the enumeration district covering that location. It can be tedious, but if you are familiar with the place your ancestor lived, success can be yours. I found both my maternal grandfather in Clay County, Ind., and my paternal grandmother in Madison, Jefferson County, Ind., in a matter of minutes because I knew the township, street, road, or section of town each lived in.
The website for the 1940 census is at 1940census.archives.gov/. I won’t say it’s the easiest site to use. You first have to work your way through the informational steps to get to the series of census pages for the enumeration district where you think your ancestor lived. Then, the actual views of the pages are gigantic-size script in a tiny window – you have to “download” each page just to see it in a satisfactory format. On the home page, however, are links to three other sites that are working with the National Archives to put the 1940 census on line with an eventual name search. These are Archives.com,
FindMyPast.com, andFamilySearch.org.
Each also has a part of the 1940 census on its site as they race to load the entire census. Archives has a search engine in place, but only a small number of names are on it, and I could not view any of the pages when clicking on view the original.
At the above site, you can also volunteer to help index the 1940 census.
History
GENEALOGY: Cemetery Committee to conduct restoration workshop
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