If you want a transfer, please include the memorial # and YOUR Find-a-Grave #.

I have been working on Polk County for 20 years. I want every burial to have a memorial and I want every memorial to have as much info on it as can be found. These memorials are a good easy-to-find place to have all that info. I also want every photo to be outstanding, so I keep plugging along every sunny day, cursing the weeds, the mud, and the vandals. If you have a better photo, add it! If I run across it, I'll delete mine, because, after all, this is about the people we're honoring.

I've been out trying to get better photos and I noticed all the wonderful work that volunteers have done cleaning the stones! Wow! What a difference! Also the people who have been weed whacking the flat stones. Love it, love it!

And thank you to all you researchers who add obits! There are a lot of veterans who don't have markers, and the people who add markers can find them now that there are obits! (That's why I've been marking them in Find-a-Grave so their memorials are easier to find.)

I have another job for everyone out there. There is now a designation for "veteran" that you can check on a memorial. Do an edit on the memorial, then look almost to the bottom for the designation "veteran" and check it if you know the person is a veteran. Clue: Veteran stones or plates or designation on a stone or the bronze veteran's marker, the obit, or if they died in a veterans hospital.. Once all the veterans' memorials are marked, it means you can pull up a search page (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial)

and plug in the type "veterans" and then other options like surname and/or location to pull up a particular batch of veterans' memorials. But first we gotta designate all the veterans' memorials.

Did you know there's a date calculator on line? If you know the death date, and the age, you can calculate it & add the birth date to the memorial!

https://www.calculator.net/date-calculator.html

There are other links you can use too:

U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014:

https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/3693/?redirectFor=db.aspx

https://www.usgenweb.org/

https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/

Help me link all these memorials in Polk County, Iowa. All info I have added come from census's, SSI, cemetery records, Ancestry.com and YOUR info. I do not keep records of where this info comes from. To edit, click on the "suggest edit" button in the top right corner of a memorial. Fill in your additions/corrections & click "Save Suggestions" at the bottom of the page. The owner of the memorial has a month to accept or reject your edits. If the owner doesn't see to your edits, Find-a-Grave editors will approve your edits.

I don't have time to check your suggestions, so I just accept them as is. If you provide proof of your changes, I will add them to the bio, and then others can see why there are changes. If I verified every edit you sent me, I would have to go to the county seat where you found your info; I would have to have a copy of your family bible; I would have to purchase the records you used to add the info; and I'd have to purchase all newspapers on line, all obits on line, all the places YOU went to to get that info.

Be sure to click on photos, as the captions might have some great info.

When a person has no stone, I go to the exact spot where the person was buried. I can do this if I have maps & cemetery records.There is a reason why I do this: So YOU can find the spot, and perhaps add a stone. There are a group of volunteers adding veterans' stones & they use these photos to properly place the stones. Please don't ask FAG to remove them. You're not helping. Because of the photos I have taken of GRAVES, people have been asking FAG to remove them, I am assuming so that they can query all the memorials & find all the ones without GRAVESTONE photos. Don't know what the answer is but I am going to start changing my grave photos to "Other" so that these people will stop removing my photos of graves that have no stones.

Remember when you add a photo of a PERSON, click on "Add a photo..." Add your photo, THEN when the bar is filled in & green, notice the little line that says grave person family other. The default you will see is grave. Be sure to change it to "person". This is important, because it will make sure no matter how many grave pictures there are on this memorial, the PERSON's photo will always be on top.

For those of you who have noticed I list everyone in a lot, keep in mind I still may DO stuff to a memorial even if I have transferred it! Case in point- Wonderful volunteers have cleaned a whole bunch of stones in Woodland. They look terrific! If I want to retake everybody's stone, my lists & links are invaluable!

I cannot swear that every person listed is buried in the lot listed. I found some strange couple supposedly buried in MY family plot, according to cemetery records. Well, they're not physically there-there's no room! And of course there's no stone, but I've never found their stones elsewhere, so where are they? But I did find something interesting. When people had big family plots, they would give a tiny space to a friend/neighbor who had no means to bury a baby, so there may turn up a cemetery record showing some stranger buried in the family plot.

Cemetery 101:

Cemeteries care about burial dates, not birth or death dates. If they bury someone, and then move them somewhere else, they will have 2 burial dates, or maybe a date much later than the death date. Very confusing! If there is no stone, then take the dates on the memorial with a grain of salt. Actually, even with a stone....

It's very easy for me to approve your edits when you add them yourself. Now having gone thru tens of thousands of records for Woodland cem, I have found lots that are missing or incorrect. You can check yourself. To get these records corrected, the RELATIVES must call the cemetery & request a search of records & correction. Expect a long process. I've found entire lots of stones with the same surname, & yet the records show each interment with a slightly different spelling.

Feel free to ask me to transfer. If someone is managing a memorial of your relatives, & you would like to rearrange the photos (which is one of the few things you cannot do by yourself), you can ask the manager to change things around or you can ask if they will transfer the memorial to you. There are rules about transferring, but if I'm not related to the person in the memorial, then I'd be glad to transfer. Remember, tho, there could be other relatives.

Even though my goal is to link everybody to everybody else, I'll need your help! And if I transfer it to you, be sure to add stuff! You must be a member of FAG to add/maintain a memorial. See "Help" button at the bottom of the memorial page (go to about middle of page).

Please be patient! My e-mail is pretty heavy. Most e-mails are straight forward. Do this, transfer that, but then there's those ones that get me scurrying around in the files trying to find a trail, a connection, a vague memory of something, someone. The more memorials I add, the burieder I get.

Also remember, there are mistakes on gravestones. Mistakes on marriage records, death certificates, birth records, census records. People may swear by census records, but I know of a relative-a teenager in 1880 who was living with her grandparents (parents were close & doing fine), and she was listed as "servant" on the census. Did the census worker make a mistake, or was this a whiny teenager? Recent records appear to be more accurate, but people have told me of engravers making mistakes on very recent stones. Whatever info is on a memorial, it's the LATEST info provided.

And remember-I make typos all the time. Let me know or correct it yourself. I don't verify your info. I don't have time! Lots of my info comes from Ancestry.com. If you see "s/o Joe Blow & Bibbity Boo", I'm just copying it straight from the records and they've got terrible spelling & transcription mistakes.

I have a challenge for those of you who do not live in Iowa. Snoop around in Find-a-Grave & find obits or look for them by Googling a name. (easiest way: Full Name followed by city) As more & more memorials are added here, it becomes easier to link children to parents, wives to husbands.

Photography

I'm finally getting better at taking photos. At first, the max was 50k. Very bad photos! Now it's 8M. What a difference!

If you have difficulty taking a photo because of bushes, trees, flowers, decorations, etc, I have found that the relatives/friends will see your photo, and will go out and clean up the stone! It's amazing finding a stone that was almost completely obscured suddenly free of giant bushes. That means my new picture will be online and they are free to plant more stuff!

So here's what I know:

It's not enough to show a stone exists. It's not enough to show the family stone or a cemetery photo. If there is a stone, take a GOOD, clear, readable photo. Did you know Windows automatically uprights your photos for your viewing? The photo was taken sideways. It is in that form in your computer/phone. If you upload it to Find-a-Grave, it will be sideways, at least for people looking at it on a computer. You need a photo manager that will turn it right side up. Then when you look at it in computer files, you have to upright it again! I wish I could find an option in Windows to shut off that auto thing.

Sunny, Sunny, Sunny. Early morning, you can get light under the trees. Late afternoon, you can get light under the trees. Summer's full of plants, decorations & grass clippings. Fall's full of leaves & mud. Spring's full of mud & peonies. Winter light is poor but the trees are bare! Plus you get the light at an angle that creates shadows you may not get in June. You need to go in the morning & in the afternoon, every season. The hardest is the north facing stones. Iowa is not known for its north sun. Luckily there are not many such stones. To get sun on a north facing stone, you'll have to go out early morning in May, June, July, and August; also late afternoon in May, June, July, and August. You may have to go back several times to get a good shot. I use a 2" paintbrush to clean stones. A nice one for grass clippings, an old one for dirt & mud. Scissors for clipping grass. If you are doing very old stones, remember shadows. You can create them by using a 4' mirror, the kind you tack to the closet door & it costs around $5-$15. Helps to have a helper but sometimes that's not possible. Just play with the mirror until you can cast sunlight at an angle across the stone, creating shadows that make the stone legible. Have fun!

I have a conundrum for you: What is a mausoleum? what is a columbarium? By the internet's definition, a mausoleum is a place with spaces big enough to put an entire casket in, while a columbarium is a place with niches only big enough for an urn or two. I thought a mausoleum was an indoor place regardless of whether the niches were small or large. A columbarium was a place outside with niches of various sizes. So cemetery records that I've seen list mausoleum as inside, columbarium as outside.

Did you know I will add a memorial & then never look at it again? If you want me to do something to a memorial, send me a message or e-mail. If you add an obit, I won't know it, so if there is info in the obit like birth or death places, I won't see it.

What is the secret to great photos? Persistence. Persistence. Persistence.

My nightmare: that people will argue on Find-a-Grave memorials by changing info on my memorials back and forth and I won't have a clue what's going on!