Hi!
The following is posted with the kind permission of our List Administrator:
I received the following plea for aid. These people seem to do a good job
and need help to continue. Old computers, memory, camera memory or if you
are so inclined a small donation. This is a 501 3c organization, so any
donations are tax deductible. Every little bit of help is deeply appreciated.
You can view their work at:
http://www.cemeterysurveysinc.com/
Rel@ively,
Patrice
Brevard GenWeb
We are located in the Western NC/Northern GA/Eastern TN area/Western
SC,
but all of our travels include cemeteries, therefore we have listings from
a number of States.
Our problem is, right now, that we have done all the cemeteries within a
50 mile radius of our homes. We go out on "requests" much further. I've
also gotten a number of people who "do" cemeteries for me, and they are
having the same issues...drive forever, and then not enough memory in our
cameras to finish!! None of us have spare money, neither for more memory
sticks, much less laptops. All of us are running on old tower computers,
mine is the newest and it's 4 years old!!
I have talked to a number of companies who clean out and then "give away"
their laptops to tax-exempt organizations, but all have said that
"cemeteries" are not their priority, nor genealogy. I have been looking
for grants and/or sponsorships for our endeavor, but so far haven't had
any bites on that either!! We want to continue doing cemeteries (we have
over 500 online now, 99.9% are with pictures of each stone and panoramas
of the cemetery).
I have a place for sending donations on my website, so far they have come
to $200 (in the past 3 years!), which is paying for the renewing of our
domain name. Everything else has been "out of pocket". Our webspace is
donated to us, on an ad-free site, by a man who is a genealogy-aholic.
(When I had Cemetery Surveys on Rootsweb's Freepages, people were
complaining about the ads popping up all the time, sometimes 3 to a page!)
I've been fighting to keep this website FREE, knowing that I, personally,
and many of my avid followers could not afford a subscription price. So
now I'm trying to reach out to the public. Any help you can offer me will
be greatly appreciated. I don't mind begging!!
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you!
Rose Birdwell, President, Cemetery Surveys, Inc.
Murphy, NC
rose(a)cemeterysurveysinc.com