"Cemetery Nerd" Graces Williamsburg Library

For last week’s installment of local authors and historians, the Williamsburg Public Library’s speaker was Jim Snyder, Jr, the self-proclaimed “Cemetery Nerd.” Snyder has served as the Blair County Genealogical Society’s President for the past twelve years, and he gave a presentation on lost and forgotten cemeteries of the Cove.

Snyder said for a three-year time span between 2007-2009, he along with others, researched and logged most cemeteries in Blair County.

This researching process may, according to Snyder, include taking photos of gravestones and logging them into a website called Find a Grave.

Snyder talked about many cemeteries in the Cove area including – the Bowers family, the Burget-Burket family, Dilling Cemetery, Ditch Cemetery and the Duck Cemetery which was located at the Eighth Square Chapel in Williamsburg.

The first burial at many of these cemeteries was in the early-middle 1800s.

Other cemeteries included in the presentation included: Graybill Cemetery, which is near the present-day Long’s Outpost, Faey Graves located near Fayetown, Franklin Forge, Falknor graves located in Henrietta, Hoover Cemetery in Henrietta, and the Deeter-Teeter cemetery. According to Snyder, 10% of most of these cemeteries do not have stones.

Other cemeteries in the presentation included: Kensinger-South Cemetery, Mt. Etna Children’s Cemetery, Plum Creek graves, Rebecca Furnace Cemetery located in Fredericksburg, Rodman Furnace graves, Schmucker Cemetery, Shiffler Cemetery, Shriver Cemetery, Smith-Skyles, and Treesh Cemetery.

Snyder says the Peck Cemetery located near present-day Long’s Outpost was the “one that started it all.”

The first known burial there was in 1825 and according to Snyder, all 23 people buried there have no headstones. Snyder also concurred that the last burial happened in the 1940s.

Snyder then discussed many burial/cemetery laws in the area. The 1994 Historic Burial Places Law which says a cemetery over 100 years old qualifies as an historic site if no one has been buried there in 50 years. Another law Snyder touched on was a law that states if a purchased plot isn’t used for 50 years the cemetery can take back ownership of the plot.

According to Snyder, 60% of all the cemeteries in Blair County are cataloged at the Genealogy Library, located in Hollidaysburg. Snyder, who has been doing genealogy research since 1983, also showed the crowd about dousing a grave, which is how they find that people are buried there through a process using two coat hangers that are to show if there is a grave, if they are male or female, and which way they are facing.

Snyder closed out the presentation with a demonstration on using the website Find A Grave, a free website used to identify ancestors, locate graves and get useful information when starting a family tree.