Ancestors At Rest: Potentially Some Unique Documents

Certainly, when you're looking to place those DNA matches in your tree, you're most likely working with the challenge of placing living people. But to find where those people fit, you have to look at those who came before. As uncomfortable as the idea of death is for many, much of our research focuses on people who have passed away. Ancestors At Rest is a site dedicated to records and information about deaths.

The site contains links to all kinds of various resources, from the expected death and cemetery records, to unique resources on items like coffin plates. Many of the resources are organized by state (but the list and areas are far from all-inclusive). They also have articles and tutorials on tombstone inscriptions, causes of death, funeral customs and more! According to the site, there are some databases not found elsewhere...but they don't actually detail the specifics on these databases. But some items are clearly not on other sites....items collected and scanned (presumably) personally by the site owner.

I was particularly interested to check out the ledger books, journals and diaries. It appeared to be a pet project the site owner was working on to scan and provide free PDFs of these original sources he had collected. I wasn't sure of the contents of these sources, and unfortunately, I still don't know. The link doesn't actually take me to any PDFs. I'd like to think it's still a project in process, but the site hasn't posted any updates.

Interestingly though, when I Googled "Ancestors At Rest", in addition to bringing up the current site, there was also a link to an older version (through 2017) when it was a Blogspot blog. The blog has a brief bio of Brian, the site creator. More interesting, some of the ledger book links on the blog DO work and take you to documents on the current site. If you're willing to do a little work to get to them, it's possible you might find some interesting tidbits! I noticed there was one ledger from Bucks County, Pennsylvania where my paternal line is from. A quick look shows it would take some time and determination to read the documents, but it's possible they may be worth the effort at some point. I actually prefer the old blog to the new site. 

Ancestors At Rest has been around since 2004, and somehow seems to be tied to Olive Tree Genealogy. Clicking on the privacy policy of the site takes you to the privacy policy for Olive Tree Genealogy. However, the sites don't actually appear to be run by the same person. Many of the links simply drive you from one site to the other. There's no information on when the site was last updated, but in and of itself, this isn't really important. Our ancestors died long ago, and if any site happens to have information on them, the details won't change with the passage of time.

By no means is this a "one stop shop" for everything death record related - far from it! But, if you're curious to learn more about our ancestors funeral customs you may find some of the articles interesting. And if you have an elusive ancestor (and who doesn't?!) it could be worth a quick peek to see if anything turns up. Sadly, I didn't find anything on the ancestor who launched my genealogy journey, but I'll keep looking whenever I find a site with potentially new information!

Image by Michael Kauer from Pixabay