The other thing is assuming everybody’s going to have a tombstone or a tombstone that survives.
Diane L. Richard: There are several popular websites that you can use, like Find a Grave, but the thing to recognize is that it takes local effort to get smaller cemeteries and graveyards included on those sites. And historically, the collection of information was prejudiced in the sense that it wasn’t as diverse as it could have been. For example, when initial surveys were done in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, they skipped African American cemeteries for the most part, which also means less of a paper trail, because a lot of times tombstones just haven’t survived in all cemeteries. The other thing is assuming everybody’s going to have a tombstone or a tombstone that survives. Sometimes a pile of rocks was put someplace, a small wooden cross was constructed, or something could have been etched in sandstone. Now we’re used to these big, formal, looked-after cemeteries, but historically, a lot of people in North Carolina would have been buried on their farms.