Andy Monat's email gives me an opening to share a problem:-
The late Florence Lesser Marmor (1933-2018) and David Roy
Gevertzman (1945-2007), together with a bunch of other volunteers [ I do
not know who they were] devoted much of their time and effort to
recording the burials at Mokom Sholom Bayside and Accacia
cmeteries.
I was the "safety depository" for backups of Florence's
research and I am currently attempting to create a working web site for
that part of the Florence research which I posses.
When she died Florence left an enormous collection of paper records which
are still being assembled by her children. I hope one day to
get sight of that archive and compare it with what I already have
electronically.
Right now I am working on a spreadsheet with about 12,700 individual
burials. It is currently in .xlsx format.
The spreadsheet has column headings
Family Name
Personal name
TYPE
[ monument. vault, mostly empty field in the data ]
Notes
[often with "death cert #" and undertaker age, cause of
death, congregation, gate number etc etc ]
Record No by cemetery
I am NOT a web site writer and would welcome anyone who can tell me how
this can be turned into a decent, searchable web site.
Simply putting a spread sheet of that size onto a web site means that it
will take an endless time to download.
Merely searching for a name is NOT good enough. For that the
enquirer would need to know how a person was recorded. With the
multitude of geographic origins of the names, spelling variations are
endless.
David = Dovid is just one example of very many.
The researcher may want to know not just "where is XY
buried" but often which people of a particular surname are
buried there? Do they relate to one another? You simply
cannot see that on a page which tells you about a single
individual.
I would like the web site at the same time to be a memorial to Florence
and David . I do not know where that can be
parked, I do not think Jewisgen is the place. Its
rules are too rigid.
I would welcome ideas and suggestions. I am struggling.
David Lewin
London
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
At 02:57 25/01/2020, Andy Monat wrote:
Bayside Cemetery in Queens, New
York has been much discussed on this mailing list over the years, but
there do not appear to have been any updates from people who have visited
it recently. Since I visited in fall of 2019, I thought I would share
what I learned which was not clear to me from the numerous news stories
which can be found online. I have no affiliation with any of these
cemeteries.
Bayside is operated by Congregation Shaare Zedek. Their web site
http://www.sznyc.org has information
about the cemetery; see especially
http://www.sznyc.org/frequently-asked-questions-bayside-cemetery.
That page also lists their email address
office@.... When I wrote that
email address, I received a reply including a map of the cemetery
including the names of the burial societies, which proved very useful;
that map was basically identical to the one at
http://www.baysidecemeterylitigation.com/uploads/BaysideCemetery-Map-WWW.pdf
. I also asked them about specific names of people I knew were buried
there, and the office staff kindly searched the records. Their
information is limited, but they did find some of the people I asked
about.
Bayside is part of the same complex as two other cemeteries, bounded by
80th St on the west, 84th St on the east, Liberty Ave on the north, and
Pitkin Ave on the south. The western part of the complex is Mokom Shalom
cemetery, which I did not research. The central part is Bayside. The
eastern part is Acacia cemetery. The exterior of the complex is enclosed
by metal fences, but as far as I could tell there were no fences between
the different cemeteries. Not only is there nothing preventing you from
walking from Acacia into Bayside, it might not even be obvious to you
that you have done so.
The area was industrial on the north side and residential on the east and
west sides. It seemed perfectly safe to us.
I was interested in burials in both Acacia and Bayside. My relatives and
I parked on Liberty Ave, near the Acacia entrance. Note that the elevated
A train of the New York City Subway runs above Liberty Ave. The entrance
gate is through the center of a two-story building which must have
formerly been the Acacia office; now there are no on-site office staff,
but a call to their phone number which I found on Google Maps and
FindAGrave (718-845-9240) reached staff located elsewhere who were able
to look up burials in Acacia and tell me which section they would be
found in.
I had brought a hand-drawn map passed down to me by a distant relative,
made at least a few decades ago. It listed certain things that clearly
matched the map of Bayside, once I was able to decipher the handwriting,
such as Liberty Ave, Pitkin Ave, Acacia, various gate numbers,
"restrooms" (just inside the Acadia entrance; these are no
longer operational but there were portable toilets nearby), names of
relatives buried there, and then some names I didn't recognize like Moe
Levy. These last turned out to be landmarks - they were names on large
mausoleums, which make for easy navigation as they can be spotted from
some distance away.
A relative who came with me had found and brought photographs from the
1970s of my elderly great-grandmother and her siblings visiting the
cemetery, including photos of them standing at their mother's grave. The
old photos of their mother Sara Scheinzeit's grave were especially
helpful, since they made clear it can be seen from outside the cemetery,
on the sidewalk! (See my current-day photos of it at
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/128107217/chaya-sarah-scheinzeit
and note the fence is the exterior cemetery fence; you'll also find other
relatives linked from that page.)
After entering via the Acacia gate, we quickly found graves of relatives
in Acacia's Mariam Polen section, near the north fence. Following the old
hand-drawn map, we walked west a hundred feet or so and were in Bayside,
where we saw Sara Scheinzeit's grave from the other side. That and the
other parts of Bayside we visited were in much better shape than I had
expected. There was some broken glass just inside the fence, but most of
the graves we saw were upright and not overgrown with trees or other
plants. The ones made of hard stone were perfectly legible, though some
gates were made of soft stone which has weathered as is typical, and
parts of them were illegible.
In Bayside, we visited gate 44 (Mariam Polen Congregation; same society
as we visited in Acacia), and gate 74 (Congregation Kol Israel Anshi
Polen Swalk No. 1). We found graves for people with the surnames
SCHEINZEIT, SCHONZEIT, DUBERSTEIN, and SCHNEIDER.
I would be happy to try to answer questions from people who have them,
though this email contains most of what I know about Bayside and
Acacia.
Andy Monat
Massachusetts, USA
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