Yadkin County North Carolina High School Yearbooks

A collection of over 50 high school yearbooks has been featured by AccessGenealogy. Covering the county of Yadkin in North Carolina, these yearbooks include the high schools of Boonville, Courtney, East Bend, Jonesville, West Yadkin, and Yadkinville. They cover the communities of Boonville, East Bend, Hamptonville, Jonesville and Yadkinville. The earliest published yearbook is a 1948 West Yadkin Yearbook called the Whispering Pines, and the latest published yearbook is a 1967 East Bend High School Yearbook called the Cats Paw.

New Oklahoma Cemeteries Online

Continuing with building new directories of Oklahoma Cemeteries online, AccessGenealogy recently added 5 new cemetery record pages for counties in Oklahoma, providing the most complete online index of available cemetery records for the following counties: Creek, Custer, Delaware, Dewey, and Ellis counties.

410 new links were added to the AccessGenealogy website through these new pages. They currently have 286,170 genealogy links on their website with only 274 reporting as bad links (about 200 of those from 2 websites which appear to be having technical issues).

Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of St. Louis

Catholic dioceses often operate cemeteries within their jurisdiction. The St. Louis archdiocese operates 17 different cemeteries around and in St. Louis.

They provide a burial index on their website which includes complete internment information on 15 of the cemeteries, partial burial information on Glencoe Cemetery, and unfortunately, no burial information on Queen of Peace cemetery (even though the search form enables you to search it). Ancestry has recently added this index to their collection. Users of Ancestry’s Family Trees or FTM may want to use their search, though the results will take you to the Archdiocese website where you will need to search again. The 17 cemeteries are:

  1. Ascension Cemetery
  2. Calvary Cemetery
  3. Glencoe Cemetery
  4. Holy Cross Cemetery
  5. Mt. Olive Cemetery
  6. Our Lady Cemetery
  7. Queen of Peace Cemetery
  8. Resurrection Cemetery
  9. Sacred Heart Cemetery
  10. St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery
  11. St. Ferdinand Cemetery
  12. St. Mary Cemetery
  13. St. Monica Cemetery
  14. St. Vincent Cemetery
  15. St.Peter Cemetery
  16. Ste. Philippine Cemetery
  17. Sts. Peter & Paul Cemetery

Search the Catholic cemeteries of the Archdiocese of St. Louis:

What Constitutes a Reasonably Exhaustive Search?

Certified Genealogist, Michael Hait, in his Planting the Seeds blog, discussed in a recent post his interpretation of what constitutes a reasonably exhaustive search in genealogy. To get the non-certified genealogists (which is most of us) up-to-speed on why this is important, let’s remember that genealogy isn’t just a hobby, it’s a science. Whenever you have a scientific field, there is usually some board which oversees that scientific field of study. That board for the field of genealogy is the Board of Certification of Genealogists or BGC. In attempting to strengthen the actual science behind genealogy research, the BGC created the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) which consists of five elements:

  1. Reasonably exhaustive search.
  2. Complete and accurate citation of sources.
  3. Analysis and correlation of the collected information.
  4. Resolution of conflicting evidence.
  5. Soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.

Michael tackles the first of these by clarifying what “reasonably exhaustive” means and doesn’t mean. I’ll let you read his article for an interpretation of a professional in the field, I’ll just deliberate on the usage of this element by online weekend genealogist hobbyists who conduct the search more for curiosity of their family tree, then for a scientifically conclusive study. After all, for most online hobbyists, the very idea of visiting a family history library and/or renting microfilm is foreign. Isn’t everything digitized and freely online?

Of course it’s not.

The definition of “reasonable” I hope you adopt in research of your family tree, and take away from Michael’s well constructed article, is to expand upon your present idea of what is reasonable proof. The idea isn’t to eliminate all sources of possible research, both online and offline, but to build up enough sources which can confirm in your own mind, the fact you are thinking of entering (or have already entered) into your family tree is true. Michael uses the fictitious example of identifying the father of John Smith to illuminate his reasoning. For most weekend genealogists he has likely taken the research much further then we would feel is needed. In my eyes, outside of a chance of illegitimacy, the identity of the father could have been reasonably concluded with only a few of the six type of sources he used in his example. But then, that’s the rub of the issue. What is reasonable to one person, may not be reasonable, or feasible, to another. What is determined as reasonable to Michael, a certified and often paid genealogist, is likely to be over-reasoned to the casual hobbyist who just wants a general idea of who their ancestors were. What I hope you take away from his article, though, is to increase the number and quality of sources you are presently using, before concluding that the fact you are entering into your family tree is indeed a true fact for your ancestor. If your own level of reasonableness presently determines that a published family tree is enough evidence for you to conclude the connection is true, then expand it by looking for corroborating evidence in direct sources, such as vital records, census, etc. If, in your own present concept of reasonableness, you can base a fact on only one direct source, expand that by requiring more then one direct source, or at the least, multiple supporting sources (outside of a published family tree) before considering the fact as truth. By each of us expanding our own concept of “reasonable” we can each increase the accuracy of our family tree’s and minimize the chance of attributing a fact to the wrong person.

Kinfolk Korner

Ramblins from the Web. Sometimes I stumble upon older web pages which haven’t been updated in a long while, but still have a treasure trove of genealogy information on them. I will begin to feature these in order that the useful genealogy they possess can be more widely circulated to other interested genealogists.

Books And Bibles

Cemeteries

Washington County, Arkansas

Miami County, Kansas

Stanford, Lincoln County, Kentucky

Cuyahoga County, Ohio

Tulsa, Tulsa County, Oklahoma

Jenks, Tulsa County Oklahoma Collection

The Lyle Ann Shults Collections

Creek County Oklahoma Collection

Fayette County, Kentucky Tax List – 1788
Fayette County was, at that time, part of Virginia

The History Of The Cradle Land
By T. H. Kinsella, LL. D., 1921
A History Of Miami County, Kansas (Partial)

Kinfolk Korner holds an eclectic collection of material for specific parts of the web which obviously have a genealogical connection to Susan Strain, it’s creator. It remains as part of the AHGP collection of location specific websites.