A Christmas present for my genealogical friends. It might seem that I have been inactive for the past month. Although I have not posted any new records to my website during that time, I have been working daily on this Columbia Co. project.. Lawrence V. Rickard of Columbia Co. volunteered at the Columbia Co. Historical Society to make full name indices for 33 cemetery books which had none. The fete required two to three years to complete. When the indices were finished in 1994, he merged them all into one giant index containing over 60,000 names of people buried in Columbia Co. Some of the names are duplicates because a cemetery may have been transcribed in more than one "book". These books are almost all are notebooks and had limited distribution, so the following information will be new to most of you. The index to these books consists of a person's name plus the number of the book and the page(s) on which the name occurred. It was designed to be use with books that were on a shelf near the index. Since you don't have access to the books, you would only be able to tell that a person by that name was buried in Columbia Co. However, I thought that that could be valuable information for many people, so I requested that Mr. Rickard allow me to post the index. He kindly agreed. Then I realized that I could add something that would make the index even more valuable. So that you would be able to tell the "name" and location of the cemetery, I have made many trips to Kinderhook in order to record that and other information for about 350 burial plots and cemeteries. Small cemeteries didn't have names, so the transcriber had to make up something. The Columbia Co. Historical Society has agreed to provide copies of of these pages at a small fee (details online). That will allow you to obtain the life dates and possibly who was buried nearby. There are three parts to this project. 1) A webpage that contains an introduction and links to 39 alphabetical indices of names. 2) The 39 alphabetical index files themselves. 3) A webpage that contains all book and page numbers, plus the cemetery names, locations and other data. These files went through a series of revisions. If you find any broken links, please let me know. Here is where the fun begins: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~clifflamere/Cem/Col/CEM-ColMaster.htm Happy holidays. Cliff