Cemeteries of Carter County, Tennessee DVD review

I did something that I rarely do last week. I made an impulse buy, well I actually do that more often than I should, the thing I rarely do however is buy genealogical books or discs. I have my genealogical database software and subscriptions to the standard array of genealogy websites and an amazing local and genealogical library ten minutes from my house. I rarely feel the need to purchase books or discs as I can usually obtain the information from a subscription website or the local library. They become items that I use once or twice, scrape them of their usefulness and then shelve them until I need more space and sell them for pennies on the dollar at our local used book superstore. And lets not forget the expense: $40 to 60$ for a genealogy book equals a few months of ancestry.com.

So back to that impulse buy; I was skimming through a weeks worth of newsletters and spam email and came across an email from genealogical.com advertising their newest releases. Right there, front and center, was a product similar to something I’ve been planning to do for a few years. A DVD titled Cemeteries of Carter County, Tennessee by Dianne M. Snyder. So I grabbed my wallet and ordered it before I could talk myself out of it. And I didn’t think it would be a regretted purchase. First off, I love digital books… I would happily trade all of my tree based books for digital editions that I can have on my iPad everywhere that I go. Secondly, a sizeable chunk of my family tree is connected to Carter County, Tennessee. Lastly, as I said before, this is essentially a project that I had been wanting to undertake myself for a few years and never had the time.

The DVD retails for 39.99 on Genealogical.com and consists of a book in .pdf format and a folder containing photographs of the indexed tombstones sorted into folders by cemetery name. The book itself is a standard cemetery by cemetery index alphabetized by cemetery name and then by the names of the interred. We are given the name and birth and death dates, no transcriptions of epitaphs however. At the end of each cemetery’s index are directions to the cemetery and notes on the upkeep and the date that the inventory was taken. Overall, there are roughly  14,000 graves indexed in this volume, each with a photograph. Missing are the counties larger cemeteries such as Roselawn Memorial Gardens which the author describes as being “beyond the scope of the project”.

I popped the dvd in my laptop as soon as the FedEx driver handed it over to me. Within an hour I had made it through the index of the main surname that I was interested in, the Elliotts of Carter County, Tennessee and added about a dozen names to my family tree and found information to fill in some birth and death dates that I was missing. And what made paying $40 for a dvd worth it was finding a photo of my great great great grandparents tombstone which I didn’t know the location of. I also added many husbands to female ancestors and have several new lines to work on. I still have about half a dozen surnames to look into on the dvd and expect that I’ll have a similar experience with each surname as I had with the Elliotts.

Now onto the things that I’m not so pleased with. My main issue of contention is the quality of the photographs. They’re not bad photos, they’re just small. 534×400 pixels at 72dpi. I understand that with over 14,000 photographs size becomes an issue. I don’t understand however why the photos couldn’t be twice as large. As it is, the photographs take up about 1.3 GB. There is still 2.97 GB of unused space on the disc. The author could have provided images three times the size and still made it under the size limit. At $40, the photographs are an integral part of the package. Don’t get me wrong. It’s amazing to have access to photographs of every tombstone in the index. It’s like a self contained FindAGrave.com for Carter County that you never need to do a photo request for. My second issue, I’ve come across several mistakes in the index as far as dates are concerned. Thankfully there is a backup in the form of a photograph that you can look at and get the correct information. Here’s where my first issue comes in: one of the names in the index matched one of my ancestors, was buried the same place that a few other people with the same name as other known ancestors were buried but the dates didn’t match up with the dates that I have other sources proving. So I take a look the photograph and see that my data is in fact correct. The problem seems to be, and I don’t know this for a certainty, that the author based the transcriptions off of the photos rather than taking the transcription while in the cemetery. The tombstone in question was barely readable in the image and when zoomed was pixelated to the point of uselessness. This isn’t so much a problem when the tombstone is clean and well etched and filling most of the frame, but is a real let down when the stone is smaller and not as legible to begin with. My last complaint is that the author has locked the file. Find a page or two that you would like to print out? Too bad. Printing isn’t allowed.

Overall a nice DVD that I don’t regret purchasing. Nicely packaged and the digital book itself is professional and loaded with information. Would recommend to anyone with roots in Carter County, Tennessee. I am hoping to contact the author regarding obtaining larger digital photos of some of the stones. Hopefully this will be possible as it looks like they were all batch processed in Photoshop to obtain their final size. I really hope to see more projects like this one.