A very informative read for people researching their family history. It is a great book for beginners as well as experienced genealogists.
Contents:
Part 1
Planning Your Trip to the Cemetery
1-Why Cemeteries?
2-Cemetery Records Crash Course
3-Finding Your Ancestor's Graves
Part 2
Researching on Halloweed Ground
4- Cemetery Research Strategies
5- Reading Headstones
6- headstone Iconography Guide
Part 3
Making Sense of Your Research
7- Next Steps
8- Rcording Cemetery Date Online
Part 4
Digging Deeper
9- Other Records
10- Preserving Cemeteries
Appendix A: Worksheets
Appendix B: More Resources
Index ( )

Now I read throughout most of the chapters for research. This is clear and concise language for even a beginner to understand. I borrowed this one from my local library but I will be looking into purchasing a copy for my collection to help me more in my research of my family. ( )

Journalist Joy Neighbors turns her attention to cemeteries for this title. Neighbors provides rudimentary information on abbreviations and symbols often depicted on markers. She discusses the materials from which markers are made. She provides tips to prepare for a graveyard visit and for photographing stones. These tips include cautions about ways genealogists and others tried to make stones more legible in the past and their harmfulness. She included information on Billion Graves and Find A Grave. The book's organization did not work well for me. Some topics seemed to be treated in sections scattered throughout the book. She introduced topics and then said, "We'll talk about that later." It is unfortunate the book went to press when it did instead of waiting just a few more months. She included information on locating cemetery deeds and types of cemeteries as well. The content is already dated due to Find A Grave's web site redesign. She included multiple screenshots which bear little resemblance to what users are now seeing. A note about the pending redesign was included, and she mentioned the "beta" site was now available. It seems screen shots should have been captured from the beta rather than the "old" version. Sentences felt "choppy" to me. At times I felt the author was "talking down" to readers. In an effort to make her content fill more pages, the author added related content such as death certificates, funeral home records, and obituaries. However, she didn't stop there but went on to include a section on basic genealogical research with checklists. This information, while possibly helpful to a beginner, was unnecessary to meet the book's purpose and wastes paper and the consumer's money, since the purchaser pays for those extra pages. She omitted grave markers made from pottery in her discussion of marker types. These are popular in some parts of the South. They tend to break at the base, but they remain quite readable. Many of the checklists and forms in the book are useful to genealogists, but a similar form can usually be found freely available on the internet. While the book is useful to some beginning researchers, most intermediate and experienced researchers would be better served by purchasing Douglas Keister's Stories in Stones or Forever Dixie and picking up information on preservation and other topics via articles in Family Tree Magazine, Your Genealogy Today, or on a blog post. The publisher provided an electronic galley of the book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

Explore the Silent City where history is alive and enlighten the path to your own heritage. Neighbors' guide is more than just a cemetery trek" how to" but is also an excellent insight into how to delve into the mystery of WHO and WHERE we came from. I have been a genealogist and cemetery adventurer for over thirty years and still managed to glen some new ideas from this guide. Internet web sites, organizational worksheets, and her own personal discoveries make this book a must for beginners and advanced researchers. "A copy of this book was made available by F&W Media via NetGalley with no requirement for a review. I have voluntarily read and the comments here are my honest opinion." ( )

2018 book riot read harder challenge: a book of social science. ( )