TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 1999-09 > 0936246193


From: Lee Hoffman/KY <>
Subject: Re: TMG-L: New user question re tombstones
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 00:23:13 -0400


kdtabb wrote:
>When recording citations from compiled cemetery tombstone records, I
>have been recording the details from the stones under the Burial tag.
>Correct? Couldn't find a tombstone/gravestone tag.

It would depend on the transcriptions to some extent, but basically I would
enter them as Sources. They would support the burial (and possibly
birth/death dates and/or relationships) of the persons named. In some
cases, the inscriptions on the stones are unique enough that they should be
included in any narrative report on that person. This would apply to
elegies as well as the humorous (to later readers) inscriptions. For
example, my 3G-GF penned a three-stanza poem in memory of his late wife and
had it inscribed on her stone. Then there is the inscription on the
gunslinger's stone indicating that he "Died with his boots on". Thus the
common everyday inscription "RIP" probably isn't very much worth
transcribing while the inscription "Our Loving Baby Girl" may be.

>I would like to be able to show somewhere/somehow that other persons
>are buried at the same site or stone --- but obviously, these persons
>are not "witnessess" to the event. Am reluctant to call them witnesses
>as it may be misconstrued that they were live witnesses to the burial.
>Is there anyway to do this and show the information like witness
>information is shown or would it have to be shown in the memo attached
>to the burial info and then repeat this memo for each person?

Keep in mind that witness in TMG is not restricted to the legalistic
meaning of the word. The Principal(s) of a tag are also witnesses. For
example, my father is the Principal of his Burial tag (he was the one that
was buried) and thus is a witness of his burial. I don't know that I will
be able to ask him what he thought of his funeral until such time as I too
am buried, but he was a witness.

If I enter a History tag (which only has Witnesses) for the assasination of
JFK, then I would put myself as a Witness. No, I was not there in Dallas,
and I didn't actually see the shooting although I certainly saw a lot of
"instant replay" of it. OTOH, I could not put my GF as a Witness because
he was dead at the time. So if a person is in some way connected to an
event, that makes them a witness whether or not they actually observed the
event although they were likely aware of the event.

Another way of showing that someone is buried in the same cemetery/plot is
available in TMG due to its flexibility. I wouldn't use the method (but I
don't care about showing the same burial place situations), but that
doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used. The idea is that you would create
a dummy person (unrelated to anyone else in the dataset). The name of the
person would be the name of the cemetery (and the grave location). Then
the Burial tag could be used to include the ID# of the cemetery "person"
(probably as Principal #2) and all other buring in the same cemetery/plot
would be added as Witnesses. You would then change the Sentence so that it
would be something like this (no quotes):
"[P] was buried <[D]> <in [PO]> <[L]> <along with [WO]>"

Hope this helps -


----------
Lee Hoffman/KY
E-mail:
My website: <http://www.users.mis.net/~lhoffman>;
--------------
A user of the best genealogy program, The Master Genealogist (TMG)

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