Cemetery trip, post-mortem

I did make it to Evergreen and St. Joseph Cemeteries today and found somewhere around 80 graves of Civil War Veterans. I took pictures of each and recorded their names, units and any other information off their headstones. It was quite a bit of work, but the weather was pleasant and I'm pleased with what I accomplished.

Evergreen includes at least 75 of the veterans, but they are all in one section, so I did not have to do much searching. The biggest problem was having to move grass and weeds from in front of the stones in order to reveal what was engraved in them.

St. Joseph's was one I had never been to. I had a list of 5 or 6 names to search for, but, unfortunately, they are not all in one area, so I had to do a lot of searching. The cemetery is not nearly as big as Evergreen, but is not tiny, and is on the side of a hill, so the walking was not always easy.

I found 3 of the names I was looking for. I am disappointed not to have found the others, but I did find 2 other Civil War veterans that were not on my list, so that is good. I just did not feel like making a 2nd trek up and down that hill today to try to find the other names, especially since some of the headstones are tough to read, so you have to get close to them to see the names and make sure you're not skipping one you need to find. I'll go back some other day, but I'm happy with the progress I've started.

I have uploaded my pictures to my computer and added the soldier names and units to them, and am now going to look on the National Park Service's Soldiers and Sailors website, which is an incredible tool for Civil War researchers (though it's not set up for the entire Navy yet.)

Here's a link to the main solider page. http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers.cfm

I've found a few matches so far, but this part of the task will be another that will require some effort and as much as I enjoy this, I'm not going go spend ALL my weekend on it. This will give me something to keep working on for a while and hopefully I'll find a lot of information here.

I guess I now need to decide how to format and store all this information, but for now, I'm putting it all in one document.

Anyway, it was a good, productive, enjoyable day today. I was fortunate that a normal July 90 degree day did not show up or my work would have been much more difficult.