What are we doing?

What a erudite, scholarly group of people looking at all those books!  But what are they REALLY doing?  We are doing shelf checks, pretending to be librarians!  Looks like fun, doesn't it. 

When we first started at the Albuquerue Public library we weren't sure where to start with transcribing.  The library workers pointed me to shelves and said "there is all we have".  So I went through lots of the books seeing if there was any information we could use, like death certificates, mortuary records or more importantly, BURIAL records.  I found many books so we started transcribing them.  Over the years the helpful people at the library would give me other ideas as to reference materials and books we should look at. 

When we started coming back into the library this summer, I noticed that we were running out of work!  There were only about 45 books left to transcribe.  With my group, it would not take long to do that.  It was time to REALLY search through ALL the books, one by one to be sure we got everything.  Our job is not done until we get it all!

So section by section, shelf by shelf and book by book, we all went through every book in the New Mexico history sections looking for anything that resembled records we needed to transcribe.  And we found more to do!  As of 2011, we have transcribed parts of or all of 300 books, about 1000 cemetery or mortuary documents.  After going through the books, we have 75 books left to do - should keep us busy for a few more years.

After two days of shelf checks, we resumed our previous work that we are all comfortable with at the tables.

Betty and Gloria, best friends



Gail, head librarian, came over to talk with us



We have found through the years many, many cemeteries in our state that have been forgotten.  Only through some of the published histories of the counties, or family histories do some of these live on today.  So many of these old cemeteries had fewer than 10 burials, the most recent being early 1900's.  They have disappeared in our desert climate and tumbleweeds, mostly forgotten.  But we find them, write as much as we can, try to get good location information (thank you Wink!!!) and submit the information to the internet as well as the Genealogy library.  They will live on forever now!

The Tombstone Project is so very important.  In a perfect society, every city, village, town and county would have volunteers working on this.  Once these graveyards disappear, so does our history, our families and our heritage as Americans.  All of our ancestors fought for their land, fought to survive and preserve their future.  We cannot forget about them now!  My wonderful group works with great dedication to this cause and with a great sense that they have protected some of New Mexico's history as well as all of our futures.  God bless all of you!