St. Stanislaus Cemetery — Hamilton, MERCER COUNTY, NJ — #Genealogy #Volunteer

Stanczyk was taking a road trip last weekend.

I took a page out of Jonathan Shea’s book, “Going Home”. In an Appendix, he lists the Polish Cemeteries across the USA. So in a kind of RAOGK, and as a way to contribute to PGSCT&NE, I started to take pics of tombstones and transcribe the pics for an index.

In a single visit I was able to do about 40% of the cemetery. I of course, am sending my entire contribution to PGSCT&NE. But, two tombstones had pics attached to the tombstone and I admired these two tombstones so much, I also added them to FindAGrave.

#Volunteer genealogists; Its another way to collaborate.

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Below is the one from the Maławski family (click to enlarge):

Marcin, Stanislawa Malawski

RAOGK is Back — #Genealogy #Volunteer #Collaborate

RAOGK (Random Acts Of Genealogical Kindness) is back. Their website raogk.org is trying to rebuild the database of volunteers. The RAOGK pages on Facebook appear to be unconnected but were created to fill the void when RAOGK.org disappeared a few years ago.

Welcome back back RAOGK!  If any of you are Polonia in the USA or are from Poland, then email me and I’ll note it here in the blog. In my day, I too was a RAOGK volunteer.

Now you can provide raogk via Facebook groups (and yes even through the old Yahoo Groups that pre-dated Facebook), volunteer to do indexing through a local society or through FamilySearch.org, (or other Indexing projects, like Ancestry’s World Archives Project). I have been a part of many of those too as well hanging out in Rootsweb/Ancestry forums.

Genealogy is collaborative. If you can go back 30+ generations (less if you are Polish like this blogger), then you are related to me and you  are helping family. At least that is how I think about it. Also many have paid me this kindness, how can I not pay it forward too?

Collaborate … Volunteer its good for you and for all.

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Genealogy Volunteerism – FamilySearch Indexing — #Genealogy, #Volunteerism, #RAOGK

Yesterday’s blog, I mentioned briefly one project that I was a volunteer for at the PGSA. Today, Stanczyk wanted to mention that genealogical volunteerism can be a Random Act Of Genealogical Kindness (RAOGK).

Of course, I know that the original RAOGK web site is currently offline (due to the unfortunate demise of the founder). Well there are many ways to be RAOGK genealogist. You can volunteer for a local genealogical society. You can help by answering an email or a questions in a forum or a Yahoo Group or a Tweet from Twitter or a question on a Facebook Group. But, did you know that Family Search has a volunteer umbrella organization for all kinds of Genealogy Indexing projects? Well, they do. They have a computer app, FamilySeaching Indexing or a smartphone app (iPhone & Android) and they have many projects spanning all sorts of locales that may be of interest to you or your family.

My picture below is my modest contribution, across a number of projects so far in 2012. Why not give it a try yourself?