Brenda Frazer sat cross-legged near a tombstone squinting at her laptop computer."Another young one," her husband, Peter, commented as he read aloud the headstone information.
"They're all young ones," she responded, glancing at the long list of children's names on the large family marker.
The Joliet woman has become acquainted with many of the tombstones in Joliet's St. Patrick's Cemetery since she volunteered for the Tombstone Transcription Project.
The effort is coordinated by USGenWeb, an Internet genealogy research site.
Project coordinators have asked genealogists from around the country to head to their local cemeteries and record gravestone information.
While doing genealogy research on the Internet, Frazer stumbled onto the USGenWeb site and saw the request for volunteers.
She immediately considered working on St. Pat's cemetery.
"I thought, `Geez, I only live a half a block away.
I can come out here and spend some hours in the fresh air."
Frazer has been working in the cemetery since late August.
By the first week weekend in October, she had recorded information from about half the estimated 1,200 graves at the cemetery.
Her husband helps her on occasion.
For him it's a few hours in the sun.
For her, it's a mission.
"It's in my blood," she said.
"He doesn't have the (genealogy) bug.
It's very hard for people to understand a drive like that."
Though none of her own relatives are buried there, Frazer feels she's paying back other genealogists who have helped her find information on her relatives who lived in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
About 90 percent of the tombstones at St. Pat's are legible.
Of the 10 percent that can't be read, most are broken or worn limestone.
She plans to come back to the cemetery to do rubbings that will extract some of the information.
"But some are completely worn and there is no information to be gotten off them," she said.
St. Pat's church records only list the names and interment date of those buried in the cemetery.
But genealogists are looking for exact birth and death dates, which is why Frazer's information will be so useful once it's available worldwide on the Internet.
As she walks through the rows and rows of graves, Frazer records every scrap of information on the tombstones: military information, epitaphs, family relationships, occupation.
She also noted a woodsman's tombstone is shaped like a tree stump.
Every once in a while she discovers a juicy tidbit of information that makes it easier for a genealogist to trace an ancestor.
For instance, one grave declared the deceased was a native of Claughton Township Lancashire, England.
Some of the tombstones list exactly how old a person was when they died instead of the date they died.
So Frazer has to add the age to the birthdate to compute the exact death date.
But sometimes the math perplexes Frazer.
"Some families all died in the same year, or kids died in the same month or on the same day," Frazer said.
"What is it that could have had a whole family die all at once, the mom, the dad and two kids? Did they have problems with a disease?'"
And she can't help but wonder about more than the names and dates she's recording.
"I'm trying to imagine what this family was like.
I think, `What kind of lives did these people live?' And I can get ethereal about this and think, `Is somebody up there watching me do this?'"
Spirits aren't the only ones watching Frazer.
She's sure cemetery visitors have been curious about her activities.
"I can see them looking at me," she said.
"They're probably wondering why I'm going from grave to grave."
Enduring odd looks, late summer mosquito attacks and the damp chill and shrinking daylight of fall have all been worth it.
Since she's listed as the volunteer for St. Pat's cemetery on the Internet, Frazer is already getting e-mail from people looking for lost ancestors.
And Frazer herself has learned something that she hopes will make it easier for future relatives to find her own grave some day.
She plans to have a metal or marble marker that won't wear down.
And she's told her husband, Peter, to forgo the fancy epitaph or "rest in peace."
"I want my complete birth and death day and the fact that I was born in Dakota County, Minnesota."
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Finding ancestors online
Brenda Frazer had been researching her family's genealogy the old fashioned way for seven years; writing letters, reading microfilm and visiting courthouses.
About a year ago, Frazer's 22-year-old son urged her to check out the Internet.
Though she's a computer information specialist at work, Frazer had shied away from the Internet.
But as soon as she hopped online, the Joliet woman was hooked.
Suddenly, genealogy research was a snap.
"You type in a surname or census information and boom," she said.
Not all names can be searched easily on the Internet, however.
Frazer is an uncommon spelling so she was able to find a lot of information on her husband's name.
But her maiden name, Martin, is too common to have much luck.
Frazer's successful Internet genealogy experience isn't unusual.
As more and more records are plugged into the Internet, genealogists are clicking on a keyboard as often as they're snooping through dusty old records.
"It's absolutely marvelous," said Kathy Zavada of Wilmington, who has been researching her roots for 12 years.
Zavada has been on the Internet only since March and she's already linked up with five cousins.
"Prior to that, it took two to three years to find a living cousin," she said.
"It (the Internet) is a great connector."
The Internet saves time and money.
Land records, civil war rosters, surname lists, Social Security information, probate records and naturalization records are all becoming more and more available on-line.
Zavada started her genealogy research because she was adopted and wanted medical information for her daughters.
She found her birthparents but didn't stop there and has been digging up information on her ancestors ever since.
She plans to teach an adult education course on Internet genealogy research at Joliet Junior College next fall.
Zavada, like Frazer, also is a USGenWeb volunteer who will help other genealogists seeking information on Will County.
Ruth Ryan, the USGenWeb project manager for Illinois and four other states, spends an hour every day formatting archival information flowing into the site.
"Illinois and Kentucky are growing the fastest," she said of the data pouring in from volunteers.
Ryan herself is a perfect example of how the Internet will help genealogists.
Ryan's grandmother had always told the family that her own father had been shot and killed when she was a child.
But she would never reveal details and took the mystery to her grave.
Through the Internet, Ryan found a woman who had transcribed tombstone information for the county in Arkansas where the great-grandfather had died.
The woman provided Ryan with her great-grandfather's death date.
The Arkansas volunteer continued to help Ryan by digging up the great-grandfather's obituary and news stories detailing his murder in 1912 by a neighbor.
"I almost had a stroke," Ryan said of finally solving the family mystery.
As a result of her positive Internet experience, Ryan, an Illinois native who now lives in New Jersey, volunteered to help coordinate information for the USGenWeb project so others could be as lucky as she was.
"I wanted to do a payback."
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To Research .For genealogy information on the Internet or to volunteer for the USGenWeb archiving project head to these web sites: [] www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery: Here's all the information you'll need to volunteer for the Tombstone Transcription Project.
The site is divided into states and each state is divided into counties, listing the volunteers working on a particular cemetery or volunteers who will search records in the county.
Genealogists can e-mail volunteers in a particular county for help on their own roots research. [] www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb: USGenWeb is a digital library created in 1996 to present transcriptions of public domain records online.
The records include U.S. Census data, marriage licenses, wills and other public documents.
USGenWeb also provides support services for online genealogy activity. [] www.rootsweb.com: This site hosts all of the USGenWeb archives and information on the Tombstone Transcription Project.
But the site also is the "oldest and largest" genealogy site on the Internet, according to the home page.
The site includes a list of more than 500,000 surnames and a form for adding the surname you are researching. [] www.cyndislist.com: A good place to get started.
Cyndi Howells' site includes more than 31,300 links which are categorized and cross referenced in over 90 categories.
Howells has written Netting Your Ancestors, a guide to finding information about your ancestors on the Internet.
The book costs $19.95 and is available through Genealogical Publishers Co., (410) 837-8271.
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