Church Record Sunday: Church Cemeteries and the Liberty Baptist Church Cemetery

There are many places to find lists of  church cemetery burials. One of your first searches should be on the Family History Library Catalog. Search on the place where the church is located and then look under the subject category "cemeteries." You can also conduct a keyword search for the name of the church or cemetery.

Online cemetery websites like Find A Grave and Interment.net can also be places to find burials. The USGenWeb and other genealogically related websites might also be of use.

In some cases, you might find information information posted by the church or local volunteers. To find these documents, Google the name of the church and/or the cemetery. A good example is this pdf document for the Liberty Baptist Church Cemetery in Bessemer, Alabama. This includes information about the cemetery as well as a census of the burials.

Never Forget: Memorial Day 2012

Fredericksburg National Cemetery (Virginia). Published by Walter H. Miller

The image above is a postcard (photo by Walter H. Miller) of the Fredericksburg National Cemetery. The information on the back states:

"...a part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, Fredericksburg, VA. Here are buried some 15,000 Union dead, of which 12,000 are unknown, from the four battlefields in and around Fredericksburg. The monument is to Union General A. A. Humphreys." (emphasis mine).

In our family Memorial Day has been a time where we have visited cemeteries and placed flags on the graves of those buried in the Riverside National Cemetery (California). It's a good time to remember the soldiers in our own families and take some time to learn more about their lives and deaths.

Riverside National Cemetery (California), Photo (c) 2011 Gena Philibert-Ortega

Last year in a blog posting for Memorial Day, I provided a short history of the holiday and the poem In Flanders Fields. You can read that post here.

This article by a California newspaper columnist, John Hunneman,  is about his pursuit of his Civil War ancestor, a  Private in the 1st Massachusetts Infantry. Some great ideas for research from a non-genealogist.

To learn more about the men and women in your family who fought for our freedom, check out the webpage Research Military Records on the National Archives website.

Have a safe and meaningful Memorial Day.