Cemetery database boon for researchers

By Linda CarmanPrint Story | Email Story
WILLIAMSTOWN — A Lasell College professor with Williamstown roots and his students have presented the Williamstown House of Local History and the town with a database that was hailed at its presentation as a boon to genealogists. The professor is Richard Dodds Jr., whose parents, Dick and Meg Dodds, are active in the House of Local History. And Dick Dodds, a retired Mount Greylock Regional High School English teacher, was among four volunteers updating records for the oldest part of Eastlawn Cemetery. The others are Annette Jenks, Carole Welsh and Kay Sherman. “This will be fantastic for genealogists,” said Town Clerk Mary C. Kennedy at Dodds’ presentation at the Milne Public Library Monday. “Once we have this, we’ll wonder how we ever got along without it,” said Parks and Cemeteries Superintendent Chris Lemoine. “This helps everybody – families doing research, genealogists, funeral directors.” Library Director Pat MacLeod said the database will be valuable to the library. “This’ll be a wonderful thing to have,” she said. Volunteers last summer surveyed the old section and the cloverleaf at Eastlawn, recording 91 pages of information detailing the 475 lots, 1,595 monuments with inscriptions in five languages for 1,426 deceased people, including 55 veterans. Dodds, who graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School in 1980 and Williams College in 1984, has a master’s in education degree from Harvard University and teaches computers at Lasell College in Newton. “We want people to be able to get to this data,” he said. “Someone doing genealogy and hunting an ancestor can click it and print it in Australia.” The database, he said, will encompass more records that can be pulled as needed and give stronger “data integrity.” Dodds was accompanied by students from his course in database management and design, Cynthia Chou, Edin Rizvanbegovic and Ken Wu, who have worked on the database for the past seven weeks. Seven of the nine students in the course signed up for service learning, work that benefits a community. The database was built after conferring with House of Local History members and town officials on the information they wanted to be included. People seeking a relative can, for example, proceed with only one name, if that is all they have. George, for example, will appear in a table, designed as first name, last name or middle name. Veterans can be sorted according to the wars they fought in. For example, two veterans, William B. Sherman and Levi Deacon Smedley, fought in the Revolutionary War, and Smedley fought again in the War of 1812, among four local War of 1812 veterans. The cemetery also holds 38 from the Civil War, one from the Spanish-American War, six from World War I, two from World War II, and two from unknown conflicts. One of those two, Marion Kerr, is presumed to be from World War I because he served with the 301st Ambulance Co., A.E.F. [American Expeditionary Force], which fought in that conflict. Lemoine also noted that medical researchers and historians can use the information to track epidemics. “In two years [in the town’s early history], 50 children died,” he said. People can also be found through their affiliations, such as the GAR [Grand Army of the Republic]. While more than 900 inscriptions are in English, as could be expected, a handful were in French, and one each were in Danish, German and Latin. The database was scheduled to be installed early this week. The next cemetery to be included in the database is Southlawn, being surveyed by volunteers from the South Williamstown Historical Committee. That project is twofold. The Community Preservation Act Committee has also recommended a $35,000 grant to restore and reset gravestones in Southlawn. There is an earlier link between Lasell College and Williamstown. The college was founded by Edward Lasell, a graduate of Williams and a former professor here, who is buried in the Williams College cemetery and for whom Lasell Gymnasium is named.
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