In 1970 two Mineola women began painstakingly recording every grave marker they could find in Wood County and published their findings in a limited-edition four-volume set.

Now that genealogical treasure trove has been digitized and made available for all the world to see online.

Steve Turner was just a boy when his mom, Ida Marie Turner, took on the project with her friend Adele W. Vickery.

He and sister Lisa often accompanied the amateur historians on their journeys, reading names and dates as their mom recorded them in spiral notebooks, sometimes having to use a wire brush to remove lichen or making pencil tracings to reveal the information.

Back home she would carefully record the information from her notebook onto index cards to be able to sort the information.

Steve recalled the click-clack of her manual typewriter was often the background noise in their home as she transferred the details from those cards onto typed pages.

Some days were like scavenger hunts, Steve recalled, as they tried to locate small, out-of-the-way family cemeteries.

Once the books were published, people interested in genealogy who found out about this resource sent letters to Mrs. Turner from all over the country, Steve remembers.

She would be amazed, Steve thought, at what could be done today with computers, data bases and digital photography. Each grave site could be recorded with the precise GPS coordinates, for instance.

He can imagine his mom with a laptop or iPad making the work of recording history much easier.

And she would be thrilled that the information was being made available to a much larger audience.

Ida Mae Turner had a true passion for genealogy, her son said, a trait she shared with Mrs. Vickery.

When she wasn’t traveling around the county to record markers, she might be at the microfilm reader at the local library.

The two ladies’ research into their own families morphed into a much larger project that they thought would help others along the same journey to discover their ancestry.

The second and third volumes came out in 1971 and the fourth in 1972. They also published a book of Wood County marriages from 1879 to 1903 in 1971, taken from courthouse records.

Steve hopes someone else will take on the task of bringing those cemetery records up-to-date, with many more burials across the county in the 50 years since the ladies concluded their work.

The books were digitized through a grant with the Portal to Texas History project of the University of North Texas.

Joyce Williams, with the Mineola Landmark Commission, helped shepherd the project through the two-year process.

“This is an important piece of history,” she said. “People don’t realize what a monumental undertaking (that was).”

One benefit of the work the Turners and Vickerys accomplished is that some of those markers that were recorded are no longer legible, or at least quite difficult to decipher.

In the forward the ladies wrote, “There are many reasons for our compiling and publishing these records. Many of the older stones have already deteriorated and it was our desire to get as many of these inscriptions as possible into permanent records so they might not be lost. Also, this may be the only source for much of this information.”

Each cemetery’s location is given followed by an index of all the names. Then each name is listed with birth and death dates, with notations such as “no dates” or military service information or family relations. Sometimes interesting epitaphs were also included.

A complete surname index appears in the back along with a hand-drawn locator map of the cemeteries.

When they came across interesting or unusual stories, they are related in more detail in the back.

For example, “In addition to the members of the Dunahoe family reported on page 228, there is another grave – unmarked – on this farm.

“It was during the Civil War when a prisoner was to be executed here and the property belonged to a Jaco family – first name unknown. The prisoner was directed to dig a grave – it was to be his own. Two of the men present engaged in an argument (subject unknown) that ended with one of the men – his name was Jaco – being shot and killed.

“During the confusion of the argument, the prisoner escaped and the grave that had been prepared was used for Mr. Jaco. This grave is now unmarked, but it is believed to be in the vicinity of the carport of the present home.”

And the contributions of Lisa and Steve are also acknowledged, how Lisa noticed certain details, such as whether children might be twins or that a wife was much older than a husband.

Steve would ”humanize” the names and dates by pointing out such details as a lady who was born on the 4th of July or a boy who died on his birthday.

Steve’s interests soon shifted when his dad, George Turner, bought a Mobil service station in 1972 on W. Broad St., across from the present-day Sonic, and as a 10-year-old he went to work there.

But he remembered closing the station on Sunday afternoons so his dad could drive his mom, who did not have a license, to check on cemeteries.

Adele Vickery also acknowledged the contributions of her husband, A.N. Vickery Jr.

In addition to selling a few hundred copies, the books were also made available to the county’s libraries. The online version can be easily located by searching for Wood County cemeteries.

At the conclusion of the final volume, the ladies wrote, “Although we devoted a number of years, traveled many miles and talked to many people, we are satisfied there are still ‘unknown’ private burial plots left in the county.

“Most, however, have been cleared and put to pasture.

“We feel that we have found most with marked graves, and we have spent a great deal of time checking out others that proved to be only ‘hearsay’ – while others with markers, have had the markers deliberately destroyed.

“As we noted at the beginning, this was a project to record the information of the marked graves – and much needs to be done to secure the information on the unmarked graves in the county.

“A project of this size, however, could only be successful if each cemetery association could devote their time and talents to it – it is just too great an undertaking otherwise.

Some of the markers we have recorded have since been destroyed. This, in itself, made our work worthwhile.”

Ida Marie Turner died Oct. 23, 1993 and is buried in Cedar Memorial Gardens in Mineola.

Adele Vickery died May 30, 1993 and is buried in Concord Cemetery in Quitman.

In a nod to the computer age, both graves can be found on findagrave.com, a resource that has helped fill some of the gap since the two woman completed their journey.