Grave Hunting Part One

An important piece of any genealogical search requires a little field work. Graveyards are a great place to find info on family from a birth date to a death date and even family relationships. My first genealogical grave hunting trip was with my grandparents. They knew where all the family graves were located around their hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas. One weekend I grabbed my trusty handheld GPS and my camera and we jumped in the car for a tour. 

Granddad visits with his parents while Grandmother takes a gravestone picture

Mining the Family Bible

Probably the biggest documentation breakthrough in my Smith genealogical journal was when my grandfather mentioned that there was a family bible with some information that I would be interested in.  The bible was with his nephew since it was passed down through the his oldest sister, Evelyn.  Granddad made arrangements to go pick up the bible before I came for a visit one weekend.  That weekend we also hit the local cemeteries, but this post will be focused on the family bible.  After a nice lunch with my grandparents we went to visit my great aunt and her son to pick up the family bible and take it home.  I gingerly held this old, thick book in my lap on the way back to the house.  It had an old hard leather cover that was nearly coming off.

The old weathered cover of the J R Smith family bible

Collecting Family Documents

The next step in my journey was getting copies of any family documents. Things we’re looking for here include (but aren’t limited to):

• Birth Certificates (and Birth Announcements)
• Death Certificates (and Obituaries)
• Marriage Certificates (and Newspaper Announcements)
• Military Records (most service men kept a copy of their separation paperwork)
• Photo Albums
• Scrapbooks

Start from the beginning

I realized after I made my first post that I wasn’t really starting from the beginning.  The very beginning came around 1998 when I got interested in learning more about my name.  Before long I bought a genealogy program and filled out everything I knew about my Smith family (which turned out to not be much).  I printed out a family group sheet and went to visit my grandparents.  I spent a few hours at the kitchen table with my mom and my grandparents and came up with the following notes.  You can see that I started out with some misunderstandings of the family myself.  Here’s the original family group sheet with my handwritten corrections and additions:

Handwritten notes to my original family group sheet

We all start somewhere…

Most family histories start with a family bible.  While the family bible comes later for me, my Smith family history starts with the book, “The History of Craighead County Arkansas” by Harry Lee Williams.  Talking about family with my Granddad Smith one weekend, he asked me, “Have you ever seen this book?”  In the book he showed me his grandfather (my third great grandfather) Jesse Robin Smith and his brothers: