I just added 14,249 new records:

- 1200 death notices/obits from the Beaver Herald
     (still have 1910 through 1919 to extract)

- 1400 death notices/obits from the Daily Ardmoreite
     (still have 1903 through 1919 to extract)

- 6000+ deaths from Creek by Blood Dawes Enrollment cards
     (still have 1100 cards to go through)

- 4000+ deaths from Creek Freedmen Dawes Enrollment cards
     (still have 100 cards to go through)

-1000+ deaths from Chaney Funeral Home of McAlester OK books
     (still have vols 1-3, 9B and 10 to go through)


These are my current ongoing projects. As smaller sources become available, I take time off to do through those sources.

After I finish the Creek records, I will still have Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee card to go through.

*** Current Total:  353,507  pre-1920 Oklahoma deaths!! ***

Here's an update of "projects" I'm currently working on:

Beaver Herald (from Chronicling America)
 - currently at July 1908 (over 1000 entries so far)

Daily Ardmoreite (from Chronicling America)
 - currently at May 1902 (over 1300 entries so far)

Gardens of Stone: Cemeteries of Harper County OK
 - have T through Z to finish

Dawes Commission Enrollment Cards
 - working on Creek Indians...have finished Creeks by Blood and am now working in Creek Freedmen. (over 4000 entries so far)
 - finished Seminole Indians...all records on Fold3 checked.

Rose Hill Burial Park in OKC
- going through sexton's card file...finished through surnames starting with J.

 Soon I will have some comments on Indian records created by the Dawes Cimmission. And I won't make you wait five months for the next post!

Checking "Unusual" Sources

I often hear genealogists say they never check books in a certain area because "my families never lived anywhere near there."

I was at the Belle Isle Library in Oklahoma City recently and looked at what was available at his small local library in its 929 (genealogy) section. I saw an interesting book: Over My Dead Body! The Story of Hillside Cemetery © 1996 by Freda Carley Peterson. Since cemeteries are just about my favorite places to visit, I thought I'd visit this one in Silverton CO via the book.

Now I have never had family that lived in this area. But for nearly 20 years I did publish the Beckwith Newspetter which covered all the US. I found an unlikely entry for one of the Beckwiths:

Beckwith, Alicia Phulura temporary marker- June 23, 1907-May 17, 1908- Age 11 Months- On a Sunday at Oschner hospital in Durango, Alice, the baby girl of Bart (Barzilla) and Ethel Beckwith, was called away from earth by the angel of death. She had suffered intensely from bronchial pneumonia. Alice was born in Silverton, was the second Beckwith child to died before reaching the age of a year. Fred Carter officiated at Alice's funeral, held in the home of her grandparents in Silverton, William J. and Elizabeth Redda Pearce,a nd burial was at Hillside Cemetery.

Years ago I found this family in Silverton, San Juan Co. CO, but that was before this book was published. Who would think to check the very small genealogy collection in a satellite library of a metropolitan library system. But there the information is! and look at all that is provided in the short entry: complete name of child and parents, birth and death date and burial place of child, names of mom's parents and where they lived. A gold mine of information!

Don't forget to check the 929.1 through 929.3 section of your local library. You may just find a gem like I did!

Death Synonyms

In searching through various on-line scanned newspapers, I run into the problem of time. Do I look trough each page of each issue (like I do with microfilm)? Or do I use the search engine? Well...I have been using the search engine. BUT...I have found that in order to access the most death entries possible, I must use multiple searches. The following are most of the terms and phrases I have searched by:

buried
casualty
casualty list
cemetery
deceased
death
death report
demise
died
drowned
eternal rest
funeral
funeral home
grim reaper
interred
killed
life eternal
mortuary
murdered
obituary
passed away
probate
report of deaths
suicide
undertaker

Works in Progress....

Current total of the database is just over 268,000 entries.

Current extraction "projects":

Beaver Herald (Beaver Co. OK) 1895-1919.
- Currently in late 1902.

Durant Weekly News (Bryan Co. OK) 1904-1919.
- Currently in mid-1914.

Wapanucka Press (Johnston Co. OK) 1902-1907.
- Currently in Aug 1904

Our People and Where They Rest ©1970s 12 volumes by Tyner.
- currently near end of volume 4.

All these projects are slow going. But I'm still averaging over 1000 entries per week. My goal for the year was to average 5000 per month, or 1250 per week. I have surpassed the "yearly amount" in 7 months, so hope to hit 300,000 entries by the end of the year.

Choctaw County OK Obituaries

If you haven't visited the Choctaw County GenWeb site then you are missing out on some great collections. They have a fantastic listing of cemeteries, many with tombstone inscriptions and photos. They also have an obituary collection with separate links to each person that has an obit or death notice. It took me three weeks going through the links and identifying those who died pre-1920 and adding them to my database.

Tonight I added 954 entries to my Pre-1920 Oklahoma Death Index. The majority of these entries are from the obituaries at the Choctaw County GenWeb. Some of the entries (about 25) are extracts from Texas Death Certificates available at . Most of the 25 died in Texas but were returned to Oklahoma for burial. Some were former Oklahoma residents who died and wre buried in Texas.

Kudos to Ron Henson for his Choctaw County GenWeb site and for compiling the obituary list, and JoLynn Self for her work on Choctaw County cemeteries.

The Tulsa Star

The Tulsa Star was a newspaper in Tulsa from 1913 to at least 1922. Copies have been scanned and scanned images are available at the National Archives "Chronicling Amearica" site.

For the past week I have been extracting notices of death from this newspaper. The unique aspect is that the paper was a Black/Negro/Colored newspaper, so the vast majority of local news articles were about Blacks in Tulsa. At least that is what one would think.

This paper served ALL of northeast Oklahoma and had regular "correspondent" columsn with local news from McAlester, Bartlesville, Okmulgee, Claremore, Boley, Sapulpa, Coweta, and many other towns in Oklahoma.

Most of the death notices simply contain the person's name, death date, perhaps a relationship, date and location of the funeral, and the name of the undertaker/funeral home. BUT...a great source for Tulsans not likely recorded elsewhere.

In all, I was able to find 288 different death notices from 1913 through the end of 1919. Only a few are for the prominent in the community. Many are for infants and those murdered. Many others are from correspondent columns from across northeast Oklahoma or for the Greenwood neighborhood and Gurley Addition in Tulsa.

The search "engine" on Chronicling America leaves much to be desired. In one case I was searching for all occurrences of the word "funeral". It brought up a page with the word funeral highlighted within a death notice. But it failed to recognize the word "funeral" in the headline for another death entry on the same page. So I'm sure I missed many death notices, but that will be the case for all papers I search on-line.

Also added to the index this week are pre1920 burials in Riverside Cemetery at Mangum OK, Fairview Cemetery at Tuttle, and more entries from Oklahoma's Confederate Pension Index cards.