Steve Averill will soon be visiting Connecticut and plans to visit family sites around Pomfret. As part of the "research, visit, follow-up, repeat" approach, he's been identifying interesting places to visit and things to do. One item Steve Johnson calls "a five dollar mystery" concerns locating particular gravesites in large, old cemeteries that do not have good maps. In this case, the cemetery has over 2,700 graves and looking without "knowing" could result in a full day with no joy. Fortunately, Google AI helped a lot.
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| Google AI helped Find a Specific Grave |
Google AI provided a vital, if what should have been obvious clue. Steve has known for a long time about the "Hale Collection of Cemetery Inscriptions." These were collected under the leadership of Charles Hale as a WPA project during the Great Depression. They collected inscriptions from over 2,000 Connecticut Cemeteries. Google AI, however, noted that the order of the names followed the route the transcriber took through each cemetery, and that a particular grave can be located by finding one on the list and then following "the bread crumbs" to the site of interest. Oddly, the Thompson society only had an alphabetical version of the Hale list for their cemeteries - fine if you are looking for a name, but useless to find a particuluar headstone of a known name.To make a long story less so, Ancestry has an "untweaked Original" version of the Hale List. Using it, in combination with Findagrave, I was able to put together a precise location for the grave of my 5th Great Grandfather, who fought with the Connecticut Volunteers at the Battle of Bunker Hill
| Original Hale List |
Tweaked Hale List |
 | | Original List show Joseph's Wife Where She is Buried and Son Thomas Nearby |
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 | | Tweaked List shows Joseph's Wife Lines Away & Son Thomas on Another Page |
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After additional research, including vital help from "Findagrave" photographs, I found that the headstone of interest was quite close to Thompson Road, near where it intersects Riverside Drive. You can be sure I will visit the grave of my 5th Great Grandfather.
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| Headstones near Joseph Elliott and the Street Sign/Gate that Sealed the Deal |
