Sharing from Homer Taft of the Early Settlers Association of the Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio.:
"We have with volunteers through Monroe Street Cemetery Foundation completed scanning many record books of Monroe Street Cemetery, with over a Terabyte of data produced with a view to making maps, lot layouts, and all interment records publicly available soon.
We have now obtained records for:
Erie Street, Denison, and Brookmere Cemeteries, the other oldest Cemeteries, for scanning.
These represent perhaps another 30-40 hours of volunteer time to scan.
Once these are completed, we can move on to some larger projects including.:
Woodland, Harvard Grove, Alger, West Park, and Highland Park.
There are also many other local cemeteries with records that could be scanned.
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In addition, we are working at obtaining scans of the fragile WPA maps of veteran graves at all Cuyahoga Cemeteries so they can be put on line.
Also, are discussing getting online access to all, including the oldest, Probate Court records that are a gold mine for genealogy.
If we try to do this with our first 8 volunteers who have been trained in the high speed, large format equipment at Cleveland Public Library, it will likely take many years, perhaps the lifetimes of the mostly retired who are helping.
We could very much use help from another 16 or more.
If we were to achieve even 20 hours a week of scanning, with average sessions of 4 hours and one volunteer session a month, we'd need 22 folks to do just the 8 Cleveland Cemeteries in one year.
There are also many tasks past scanning.
These need to be put through an AI-OCR process to index and translate the records that requires at least one human eye on every resulting entry to assure accuracy and correct incorrect entries from the transcribed records.
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So we are asking for your help and for recruitment of folks you know who may be interested.
With many more hands and eyes, we may be able to make these records available publicly in a year or so.
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The first step is a training session on the equipment and records to know how to properly handle which takes about 2 hours for every group of up to 4 people at Cleveland Public Library.
Then individuals schedule sessions with the large format scanner and continue the book being scanned until finished."
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P.O. Box 39291
Solon, Ohio 44139
