Dear Gravers,

In the interest of accuracy in genealogy and also to show some consideration to one another, when requesting edits will you please send me your source? Just pop it in the note section. Please make it available and verifiable. If you just say, for example, "Ancestry," that is not sufficient. Sometimes they are easy to find and sometimes it takes me forever. So as unfriendly as it may sound, in the future, if you send an edit request with no source, I will make one attempt on ancestry.com to verify the information you send before declining. I do not belong to any other search engine and will not be joining any. You are welcome to resubmit your edit with a hard copy of your source and I'll be happy to approve it. Also, if you contact me and I need to write back to you but have no way to contact you, (i.e. you are not accepting any email or messages) I will end up declining the edit. Sorry but time is valuable.

As a special favor to my friends in Canada, I transcribed the book by L. Bagnell a few years back " Burial Records of the Church of England Cemetery, St. John, New Brunswick, Canada." I would like to transfer those memorials over to someone who has an interest in the area. There are over 5,000 of them and they include the United Empire Loyalist Cemetery. Sadly, most of the memorials are children, so you will find them a very quiet lot to handle as no one is looking for them as their ancestor.

A word to the stone cleaners out there: it is, in most places, illegal to clean a gravestone without the permission of the family or cemetery or both. If given the go-ahead, you can take a look online or take a course to find the proper way to accomplish this without doing damage to the stone. Do not show up with a container of lysol and a scrub brush. When and if you do proceed, please do so with all the gentleness and respect you can muster up. Do the whole stone, not just the letters. You'll leave it looking much better than you found it. A tribute to the person's life.... and to your own. When you do, let me know. I'll be happy to note who did the cleaning.

Thanks very much and best of luck in your search.

Bonnie Kehoe Gove

Swampscott, MA.

Seabrook, NH