H-46 Daily Journal – Daily Messenger Tuesday, April 5, 2005 Remembering and preserving our past heritage Paul Kankula is a General Electric Company sales engineer retiree from the Detroit area. His hobbies are computers, database compiling, Web site design and ham radio (NN8NN). Gary Flynn is a United Parcel Service retiree from the Columbus, Ohio area. His hobbies are hiking and ham radio (KE8FD). Gary manages all cemetery-finding efforts and GPS mapping for the Golden Corner. By: Paul M. Kankula Local Columnist We who research our family's history are normally very good at remembering. But our memories only last as long as we remain in good mental health. Some of us have realized the shortcoming of faults and have prepared a family tree for our younger family members' use. Others of us simply say they wish they had done it before the old folks died off. Others simply don't care about their family's heritage. Our current family clan remembers that Grandpa Elmer Hunter's family is buried on Tall Tree Mountain, near the old Crestwood Mill, near the intersection of Larken and Butterfield Roads in Sunset, on Bubba Simon's farm, 200 yards in back of the big oak tree in their west meadow. Also, that that Elmer and his wife are buried at the Starlight Memorial Cemetery in Tamassee. The next generation will probably say that Great Grandpa Elmer is buried up on Tall Tree Mountain near Easley——on some old farm. Then the next generation will most likely say that their kinfolk are buried on some mountain that's located west of Greenville. It's amazing how quickly we forget with the passing of time! Wouldn't it be nice if we could leave exact family cemetery- finding instructions for our future generation? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a place where we could also store the cemetery's tombstone inscriptions and also store additional detailed information on these individuals —— like the names of their siblings, parents, grandparents, marriage date, etc.? A storage place where this information would stay forever and be available for worldwide Internet researching. Thanks to the Internet and a volunteer genealogy project called the GenWeb Project Archives, we can preserve all these memories. Cemetery Location Preserving In 1978, our Department of Defense started to create a network of 24 satellites intended for military applications. This was called the Global Positioning System (GPS). They wanted to give field soldiers the ability to tell where they were located, in what direction they were going, and how far they had to go. The satellite network was completed in 1994. In the 1980s, the government made it available for civilian use. There are no subscription fees or setup charges to use the GPS system. The average cost of a GPS receiver is $100 to $200. A GPS receiver must lock on to the transmitted signal from at least three satellites. Once this takes place, the GPS receiver compares the time a signal was transmitted by a satellite with the time it was received. The time difference allows the GPS receiver to determine its exact latitude and longitude position. Today's GPS receivers are extremely accurate to within 30 feet on an average. If you connect your GPS receiver to a portable computer, you will be able to view the following. Your present location (which changes as you drive. The location of your destination. The driving route to your destination. Gary Flynn of Mountain Rest and I have been GPS-mapping cemeteries for the past three years. In Anderson, Oconee and Pickens counties, there are approximately 900 "known to us" cemeteries. There are probably another 200 small family-type cemeteries that we know nothing about. Approximately 700 cemeteries have their GPS latitude and longitude values posted on the Internet. If you have a cemetery's GPS reading, you'll be able to find it a thousand years from now. Family Heritage Preserving GenWeb is a worldwide, non-profit, Internet organization that focuses on the preserving of information for online genealogical research via a Personal Computer. The project is non-commercial and fully committed to free access for everyone. Every county in the United States has a volunteer coordinator like myself. My assigned homesteads have now grown to the point where they represent the largest clutch of online genealogy research information the GenWeb Project has to offer. This growth is attributed to volunteer help that I have received from Alaska to Florida and from California to Virginia. 80,000 on-line tombstone inscriptions. 350,000 on-line vital records. 6,100 on-line church and cemetery images. 250 on-line family/church histories. 800 on-line GPS mapping values for cemetery finding. 191,200 on-line researchers have visited these "GoldenCorner" homesteads. Many of you may be asking yourselves why it is so important to electronically preserve your records——Bible info, letters, obituary notices, photographs, etc.——in The GenWeb Project Archives? After all, genealogical and historical societies have been publishing books on these kinds of records for years. Unfortunately, books will slowly decay with the passing of time. Copies of these books are available in public libraries, the LDS Family History Centers and in many other locations. However, the GenWeb Archive Project provides an ease of worldwide online access to permanent records that these various libraries cannot provide. It's interesting to note that family names, relationships, places and birth-marriage-death dates are legally classified as public records, and they cannot be copyrighted. As a result, your family information may already be posted on the Internet by another family member. The GenWeb Project Archives is an extremely large, comprehensive and ever-growing repository of genealogical and historical data. They have a search engine that makes it simple for a researcher to search an entire state for a particular name or record. A record repository like this provides easy access to the records by anyone with a computer and Internet capabilities——from the comfort of their home. Many authors have stated that having their book records online have actually helped increase the sales of their publications. One of the major reasons for this is that a researcher is able to search the online records to determine if the data needed is contained in that particular publication. Once they have determined that it is, they buy the book because they want a hard copy of the reference source. Electronically archiving records in the GenWeb Project Archives is really no different than having copies of the books available in reference sections of libraries. Another "must do" method of preserving your family heritage (names, dates, places and relationships) is to obtain a copy of the Church of Latter-day Saints free software program called Personal Ancestral File. It can be obtained by visiting their Web site at www.familysearch.org and downloading a copy. After entering your family information into their program, you will want to upload your GEDCOM datafile into their archives for permanent preserving. Afterwards, you'll also want to upload your GEDCOM datafile into Ancestry.com Inc. World Tree at http://www.ancestry.com. Ancestry.com Inc. is the worlds largest collection of family history records on the Internet. Note: GEDCOM is an acronym for Genealogical Data Communication; it's a method of formatting your family tree datafile so that different software programs and operating systems can read and understand it. Further Thoughts All of the volunteers who make up The GenWeb Project Archive across our nation are very proud of this endeavor and hope that you will find their hard work both beneficial and rewarding. Make sure you visit http://www.usgenweb.org/index.html. I have a job for you if you are interested in helping to preserve the general heritage of these "GoldenCorner" counties. Our biggest need right now is to find volunteers who would like to research and write church histories. There is also a need for individuals who would like to record cemetery tombstone inscriptions. For more information, e-mail gcgcgenweb@bellsouth.net. Cemetery names and their corresponding GPS mapping values have been permanently preserved in a national tombstone inscription project archive. Would you like to know if I have GPS-mapped, imaged, tombstone- inscription-recorded and obtained a written history on your family/church cemetery? Just visit the "Data-Holdings" Web page at any of the following "GoldenCorner" county homesteads that I manage. Anderson County Web site (Started managing in December 2003) Can be found by visiting http://www.rootsweb.com/~scandrsn/ Oconee County Web site (Started managing in January 1999) Can be found by visiting http://www.rootsweb.com/~scoconee/oconee.html Pickens County Web site (Started managing in August 2001) Can be found by visiting http://www.rootsweb.com/~scpicke2/ If you don't find your cemetery listed, please feel free to contact me. You'll need to provide me with exact finding instructions because I may know your cemetery by another name. Do not reference names of landowners or settlements when giving directions. I need the names of the nearest crossroads and the distance from them.