After I finished transcribing and correcting the cemetery record for the neighboring Host church I said I will never tackle another one that large. I haven't, but somehow I got sucked into doing the cemetery at the Stauffer (Pike) Mennonite church at Hinkletown and it's going to come in second.
It started out innocently enough with taking photos of Leroy's ancestors and relatives who are buried there. Nearly half of his ancestors from the first six generations are in that cemetery. I also have some ancestors there, some of which are our common ancestors.
Anyway, I started adding those burials to the FindAGrave website. On my trips to the cemetery I shot photos of some of the interesting and German stones which I then added as well. By then I had several hundred burials and figured that must be about half of them. I decided I might as well barge ahead and do the whole cemetery.
I managed to get a copy of the cemetery record from one of the trustees which lists the burials by rows. But I soon discovered it was transcribed in 1992 and contained a lot of errors. Back to the drawing board! I wound up going to the cemetery and photographing every stone in each of the 29 rows. Since then I've slowly been working through it, using both the cemetery record and my photos.
Once again, it's turning out to be a bigger project than I thought when I started. At the moment the first 18 rows are completed and there are quite a few I entered earlier when I started hopscotching through the cemetery. There are currently 692 burials listed, so the final count could approach 1000. I'm not a quitter and I'm in it too deep to back out now. So here I go again!
If you are interested in the Pike cemetery, you can visit it here
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