Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Searchable Oakwood Cemetery Database is Live!

Tonight I have launched a searchable database for our transcribed burial records of Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. It is located all the way at the bottom of this page, below the final blog entry. There are only around 100 names in the database at the moment, all of them happen to be of the Allen surname. I have around 800 more I plan on adding in the next few days.

For right now you can only search by last name. I will try to expand the search sooner or later but for now I will keep it simple. I am not exactly a database guru so you will have to settle for what my abilities will manage at this point.

I think there will be a minor change to the project in the next few days. I think I could run into some trouble with Oakwood Cemetery if I publish all of their records without their explicit permission. The city owns the cemetery so I doubt there would be any trouble but you never know. I am going to play it safe and change the project from Oakwood burials to simply Virginia burials or Richmond burials, something like that. This could also open up the database to more cemeteries, instead of just Oakwood.

I basically need to add a column to the database for cemetery name and maybe one for location. That will allow me to specify different cemeteries in different locations. We will have to wait and see when and if I find time to make this change. I feel like it is going to mess up my current database and search/query structure so I am afraid to make the change just yet. I will probably drag my feet until I get the courage up.

If anyone out there has access to the Library of Virginia and would like to help transcribe some of the records, I could always use the help. All you need is a laptop and I can tell you how to add records to the database online. Just let me know if you are interested.

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