The Rockville cemetery has been landmark on Long Island for many years. I can recall in the 1950's my father taking me there to look for grave stones for relatives. We had good success and the cemetery was not in disrepair.

When my father died I was left a deed to a plot in the cemetery. It was dated in the 1840's and handwritten. In 1968 I contacted the cemetery administrators to ask if enough room was in the plot so I could be buried there. I received an answer that they could not locate the plot, and all records were destroyed.

I found this quite curious and since I lived in California, it was difficult to follow up on. With my interest in genealogy of late I wondered what had happened to the cemetery? I was told by local residents it's in bad shape. A few weeks ago I contacted Diane Nostrand Cassidy, by Email. I was informed she had records on the cemetery. After some discussions, Diane provided me with probably the only records on the cemetery. They were painfully entered from gravestones by the LDS church in Lynbrook, over a 10 year period. From what I understand the distribution of this material has been minimal. I thought it would be a great idea to create a Web page for it!

This project will take some time! At first I scanned the material, corrected errors and made Web pages. This is a HUGE job. The copies are not that great and I have about a 30 percent error rate in the conversion. This was not good. The original copies have lots of copy specks, black blotches and unwanted lines. Much to my surprise the project took from November 15 1998 to May 28 1999 to be completed.

To solve these problems, I feel the actual plot records should be entered into a manually relational database. To scan them would be almost "Mission Impossible". I thought Lotus Approach (Windows 95/98 or NT) would be a good software package. I was member of the development team for this software product and know it quite well. The latest version's of Approach can produce Web pages directly, all formatted and indexed. A big savings in time. The main problem will be data entry. Once entered it can be distributed to other database (Access, DB2 etc.) , worksheets (123) or word processor software, by use of comma delimited ASCII files. I will make these available on this Web site.

I have created a download page for this site, these items will be current with the database revision. Three items can be downloaded:

1. The ASCII comma delimilited database records.

2. The Approach database file (DBF).

Clay Abrams 08/21/2001