Berry-Miller Cemetery Genealogy Update

The awesome people of Weaubleau, Missouri.

Posting Member: Jenn & Jake
Topic: Poe Baker Hartley Stone Cemetery in Weaubleau, Hickory County, Missouri, Geocode and Website, Broken Notes
Family Name Associations: Durnell
Location: Barrie Ontario – Land of the Thunderstorms
Mood: Chipper
Music:

We have had the craziest weather!  Cold and storms abound.  I just had to mention that, I’m rather enjoying it, beyond my fear that my backup battery might fail and I’ll lose all the things I’m working on.  SO, let’s start quick with Geocoding, because really this topic is all involved.

First off, the ‘broken note’ problem with our TNG software is not fixed, and it’s slowly eating through our research like caterpillars in a cabbage garden.  If you encounter a note at the bottom of a page and find it just a blank bullet space, that’s a sign that the evil ‘caterpillar’ problem has already been there.  So, in order to fix all of this, we’re going to have to recreate the trees (Screams and groans of terror inserted here) in the latest version of the program in a separate database and then replace the one that is chewing itself all up.
In short, you can see the broken part of the tree-site, but you can’t see the new part yet.  It won’t be much different – It’ll just actually work.

The main pages of our site are getting a complete overhaul, but it’s been long in coming and I don’t have a release date yet.  I’m hoping to have everything overhauled by September, but that might be ambitious given we have BHC stuff coming up and family coming to visit.

In order to begin recreating the trees, the first step we decided to take was geocoding all of our cemeteries so that when we start placing our people, they’re correctly linked.  This hasn’t been done right in the past – Mostly because when we started all this we had no clue how big of a venture it was going to be.  10 years gives things a whole long time to get bigger and bigger!  And now most of the places we’re talking about have been located by geocode with coordinates to help anyone locate them.

Note how I did say most.  Missouri is our biggest research site for the Tillery, Durnell, St. Vrain and Sappington lines.  I’m not mentioning a few hundred family surnames there, forgive me – Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Jake and I have spent about 3 days now locating cemeteries and getting the foundation laid out for all the trees…  But we’ve run into some older cemeteries unknown places that we just haven’t been able to locate.  The first of which was known as ‘Baker Cemetery’.  Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Gibson and her husband George Washington Durnell were buried there, as per the 1954 cemetery transcriptions from FamilySearch.org – I’ll actually throw a copy of that up here, for anyone who’s interested: File

Baker Cemetery, according to FindAGrave, was also known as Hartley Cemetery and Stone Cemetery.  But nothing was turning up in any way we tried to locate it – Even just scrolling through the air in Google Earth, there weren’t any visible stones where we were looking.  And so, I wrote to cousin Patti, who lives in Weaubleau and asked her if she might happen to know what we were looking for.

Within a day’s time and with the help of so many people, they had figured out which cemetery we were looking for – it’s is actually most commonly called Poe Cemetery, and even located it on Google Earth with a geocode to boot.

Poe Cemetery

So we’d like to say a very big thank you to the residents of Weaubleau, Missouri for being so kind and helpful to someone who’s a good 1000 miles away trying to solve a cemetery mystery!  Jake is especially thankful, because if I’d suggested we look in one more farmer’s field or tried following the directions just one more time, I’m quite sure I’d be joining our ancestors 6 feet under.

And with that, I’d better get back to it.  At 292 Cemeteries and counting, we have a lot of work ahead of us!

Jenn
Always one for making things pretty, Jenn is our resident artist. Métis, British Home Child Descendant, family historian and genealogist, she is always looking into some new branch of research and encourages historical preservation and education.

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