There was a very interesting article about a group of volunteers transcribing the state’s cemeteries as part of the USGenWeb Project in the Monday, July 9, Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. http://www.dispatch.com/ The URL is way too long to include here, but you should be able to find the article by googling "tombstone + dispatch" Volunteers have photographed their way through cemeteries in all 88 Ohio counties, according to the article, By Lori Kurtzman. To quote from the article, "Tombstones, he said, give information one can’t always find at courthouses: Birth and marriage certificates don’t always exist, and records of children who were born and died between census counts might be found only in a cemetery. Grave sites also can tell a different story from a piece of paper. Plots with rows of tiny headstones speak to plagues that devastated young families. Granite carvings show that a dead man was a war veteran, or that he loved music, or that his family wasn’t ready to say goodbye."