Graveyard Shift Spokane’S Maggie Rail Joins National Effort To List Every Grave In Every Cemetery On The Internet

Maggie Rail has become a graveyard guru.

The 65-year-old Spokane resident has made it her mission to see that every grave in every cemetery in Spokane County isn’t forgotten.

As part of a national project, Rail has joined other volunteers across the country to make sure the dead are remembered.

“We know headstones aren’t going to last forever, but records will help,” she said.

The project, called Tombstone Transcription, transcribes every tombstone and puts it online for the world to see.

It began in 1997 as a part of a genealogical movement, hosted by US GenWeb. The GenWeb site has links to census data, vital records, obituaries and thousands of other records for genealogists.

Since then, hundreds of volunteers like Rail have joined in and the Tombstone Transcription Project has thousands of cemeteries listed across the country.

Since she began visiting rural cemeteries a little more than a year ago, Rail has logged more than 1,700 miles on her 1987 Honda Accord traveling back roads from Chattaroy to Fairfield.

She has encountered undertakers and pesky dogs. She’s dug through dusty paper records and knee-high weeds, banged on doors and stopped locals for directions.

“Most of the people don’t know where (the cemeteries) are,” she said. “I didn’t.”

Take Mica Peak, south of the Spokane Valley.

Many of the small, rural cemetery’s 100-or-so worn tombstones haven’t been visited in years, their pioneer inhabitants long forgotten.

Rail sees to it that every one of their names, and their birth and death dates goes into a worn spiral notebook all to be transcribed later at her North Side home, where she compares plot maps and sexton records.

Later, the names are put online.

So far, 159 cemeteries in Washington have been loaded onto the Internet. Thirty-four of them are in Spokane County. Idaho has launched its own effort, with 19 volunteers from Bonners Ferry to Idaho Falls.

No one knows exactly how many cemeteries are in Washington, said historian Kevin Fraley, who oversees the state’s cemetery project from his office in Edmonds, Wash.

“Typically we find out about them by word of mouth,” he said. “I’ll have someone call me and say they passed by a cemetery.

“We’re using the technology of the present to delve into the records of the past. Until computers and the Internet, genealogy was a slow, painful business that involved a lot of paperwork and was hard to manage.”

More than 30 volunteers have agreed to trudge through Washington cemeteries with cameras and notebooks.

Some, like Spokane resident Bud Engelhardt, 61, who had been tracing his family for years, got involved because he stumbled across the Internet cemetery site while looking for relatives’ burial grounds.

“I kept wondering why they didn’t have the ones I knew about,” he said. Since then, he’s traveled to Waverly and Reardan with notebook in hand. The trek, he hopes, will help others in search of their past.

“It helps all genealogists all over the world. Not just Spokane,” he said. “The Internet has been a miracle for genealogists.”

Indeed, it has. Genealogy Web sites have become increasingly popular.

For example, the Mormon Church launched its free Web site with a database of 2 billion names in April. Since then, the site has received more than 40 million hits a day.

RootsWeb, a huge trading post for genealogical information, received more than 163 million e-mails in March. Family tree-making software programs are hot sellers, and the ranks of amateur genealogists are growing.

There are about 400 members of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society, said president John Zeimantz, many of whom turn to the Internet for help.

“The Internet holds great promise,” he said. “Computers are ideal for disseminating data and making data available more quickly.”

But for many die-hards, like Spokane Valley resident Bob Stallman, 65, who has purchased a digital camera to record all 12,000 graves in the Pines Cemetery, the passion lies in the quest.

“They say genealogy is like a disease. Once you get it, you can’t get rid of it.”

Some might say that’s all relative.

This sidebar appeared with the story: A CLOSER LOOK On the Web Interested in finding your roots? Visit the US Gen Web Archives web page at http://www.rootsweb.com/ ~usgenweb. The page links to all 50 state and the District of Columbia’s projects. To go straight to Washington’s online list of cemeteries, head to http://www.rootsweb.com/ ~usgenweb/wa/wacem.htm. Idaho’s list of cemeteries can be found at http://www.rootsweb.com/ ~usgenweb/id/idfiles.htm. A searchable database of more then 2 billion names launched by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be found at http://www.familysearch.org.