Jen discussed her burial spreadsheet that lists names, birth and death dates, burial place, grave location, and death certificate number. I will definitely add death certificate number to my spreadsheet, and I also have a couple of additions for her, and anyone else who likes to use Excel spreadsheets to manage their genealogy data:
In a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet I have a column for each of the following:
1) Cemetery
2) Findagrave.com ID
3) Prefix (I don't use this often, unless I know the person was never married, I'll put in Miss, or if a name like Kelly was a male instead of a female)
4) Last name
5) First Name
6) Middle Name
7) Suffix
8) Maiden Name
9) Nickname
10) Birth month
11) Birth day
12) Birth Year
13) Death month
14) Death day
15) Death Year
16) Plot
17) Notes
18) Marker Transcription
19) Has Photo (Yes/No)
20) (*New) Death Certificate
21) (*New) My spreadsheet contains both Brenden's ancestors and my ancestors. So I'll add a column called Tree and indicate whether it's Brenden or my tree.
22) I'm also going to add a column for obituary, to indicate whether or not I've found the obituary for that particular person.
If you've use Findagrave.com to import multiple names for a single cemetery you'll probably recognize a lot of the categories. I've added a few columns, and have kept some of the columns in the same order/format for easy uploading to findagrave.com.
I used to have a spreadsheet for each cemetery, but every time I added a new record, I'd have to add it in both spreadsheets.....until I found a better way (*Note: This is in Microsoft 2007, but other versions are similar):
1) Highlight the column headings of your spreadsheet
2) From Home, go to Sort and Filter (AZ with filter image)
3) Click the drop down arrow
4) Select "Filter"
Now all of the column heading will have a drop down arrow (pictured below). When you want to find all of the people buried in a particular cemetery, for example Pine Mound Cemetery, I select the arrow in the cemetery column and in the drop down box select Pine Mound. I can also use the drop down box to sort the columns alphabetically. Or if I was looking for the graves of a particular surname, I'd go to the last name column, click on the arrow, and select the right surname from the drop down box. Or if I was looking for all the graves I had not yet obtained pictures for, I'd go to the Has Photo column, click the arrow, and select no.
The spreadsheet also serves another purpose for me. I use ancestry, google, familysearch.org and other websites on a frequent basis. I often find a name or two that could possibly belong to my family, but I'm not sure how or if they really do belong. I put their name and information in my spreadsheet to remind me to find information about that person and see if and how they are related, and so if I find they are related later down the road, I don't lose the information I found.
I need to do some more data entry, as I currently only have my ancestors whose cemetery locations I have found. I need to add the ancestors whose cemetery location is unknown to help me remember to search for the location and remind me to look for them if I am in a cemetery that contains other family members.
I also find this spreadsheet useful to add information when I am not sitting in front of my genealogy software (Family Tree Maker), and can keep the information organized until I can input the information into the software.
What do you use to organize your cemetery/death files? Do you have any suggestions for additional columns?
