A grave situation is occurring in O'Hara Township. And if your family is from one of the Allegheny River communities from Harmar to Millvale, there may come a day that you'll want to find out what Norman Meinert already knows. It's a virtual plot you might not expect.

Norm was born and raised in Sharpsburg and has lived most of his life in the general vicinity. He spent over 40 years in the printing business and retired in 1996. Curious about his family ancestry, he began researching the Meinert family line and so was bitten by the bug Genealogicus-findrootus. It meant spending a lot of time digging into dusty books and traipsing through old cemeteries, examining dates of birth and death and discovering other previously unknown ancestral family members. Sometimes the information on gravestones was not entirely reliable, legible or complete. Technically, according to Meinert, this kind of information is considered a historical but secondary source. But he noted some markings might show who did the burial, who to talk to and what direction to go in.

Allegheny Valley Cemetery in Lawrenceville

One clue led to another. The detective work paid off. He found that in the mid-to-late 1800s, his ancestors bought land for a farm just north of today's Sharpsburg near Dorseyville. With the help of a cousin, Norm traced his family line back into the 1600s. And, as Meinert tells it, the search itself became a seed for a whole other project he still works at virtually a decade later.

"I started realizing other people were restricted from getting the same information I had gotten, so I began collecting information and putting it on the Internet," Norm says. He listed who was buried in area cemeteries, and their birth and death dates. Then, drawing upon his computer experience from working with printing and typesetting, he taught himself HTML--the language behind most web pages on the Internet. "It [the coding] didn't take long to learn," he noted. "I love doing it." He soon had his own website, which in turn caught the eye of others interested in researching their family roots.

Tarentum's Bull Creek Cemetery

Those researchers began to volunteer information they'd found, including cemetery listings, marriage records and more. The whole project mushroomed with links and historical contributions. Realizing his site was becoming a serious historical and genealogical resource, he decided to expand his boundaries. "I set a goal for myself to try to record all the cemeteries in Allegheny County," he says. That is no easy task; there are more than 500 cemeteries in Allegheny County alone.

But he has certainly tackled the job head-on. Norm Meinert has recorded nearly 150 cemeteries. He and his wife, Eileen--who has plunged into this endeavor with him wholeheartedly--take long walks in cemeteries, carefully inscribing epitaphs. Other cemetery listing in the county can be accessed from his site as well. Even people from other counties are giving him information and links to use on his web site, Allegheny River Family Archives, which is found at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~njm1

A view of Bullcreek Cemetery

There you can find extensive listings of who is buried at the beautiful, elaborate and ornate Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville, which Norm happens to know has 29 miles of roads in it (probably because he walked them!) (And I didn't know Allegheny Cemetery is "the oldest institution of its kind west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the fourth incorporated cemetery in the United States.") You will also find information listed there for those buried in Blue Run Cemetery in Dorseyville as well as Dorseyville Cemetery itself. Etna Cemetery's recorded inscriptions and O'Hara Twp.'s Greenwood Cemetery Funeral Home records from 1908 to 1941 are on the site. Contributed information from Pine Creek Presbyterian Cemetery in Fox Chapel and St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Sharpsburg are also there, not to mention tombstone inscriptions and burial records from cemeteries in Harmarville, Natrona Heights, Penn Hills, Plum, Russellton, Springdale, Tarentum, Lower and Upper Burrell, Verona, Monroeville, and West Deer.

There are other historical references Meinert has put together on Allegheny River Family Archives. Look in the 1875 Pittsburgh Birth Records for relatives, or see who is buried in the Brackenridge family (yes, THAT Brackenridge) lot in Allegheny Cemetery (hint: they weren't ALL Brackenridges). Check out some of the names of selected people who were listed in the Pittsburgh City Directory between 1815 and 1936 or see who got married in the Ministers' Marriage Returns of Pittsburgh, 1877. Or scoot through some other Allegheny County birth records, obituaries, marriage license applications, and divorces. Norm even tells you how to find historical records for area churches including Millvale and Penn Hills.

The resource that the Meinerts have pulled together online, to anyone who has spent hours with old dusty records inside stuffy archives, is instantly recognizable as a HUGE help to researchers, saving hours and hours of time. Now what took hours or even days to track down in several cemeteries or old records can be found within minutes by finding a record on the website, clicking "Edit" in your browser, clicking "Find" and typing in a word in the 'Find' box, all thanks to the Meinerts.

There are people around the world who are being helped by Allegheny River Family Archives. Norm has had someone in Germany contact him about information on his site, and just minutes before I spoke with Norman, a lady in Tulsa had just called to discuss some inscriptions she came across on his site. "It's connecting people with that sort of information," he says, "that’s the reward for all the effort. That’s the kind of rewarding thing that happens." And that's what makes Norm and his--please excuse the pun--monumental work part of Our Local Heritage.