About the Author

 

About the Author & this Website

 

About me
I was born and raised in Columbia, Missouri. After graduating from college, I relocated to desert area of Southern California. My personal life keeps me busy: I work full-time as a retail manager, have a wife and four children, and am an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon). Therefore, I enjoy genealogy during leisure times--which fluctuates between a some and none mostly depending on the work responsibilities.

My Daviess County heritage
My interest in Daviess County genealogy stems from my paternal grandfather whose parents were both native to Daviess County. My great-grandfather was Dudley Alver REID, a one-time Winston Sentinel newspaper publisher/editor and his wife Josephine TARWATER, who was in full meaning the other half of the family business. Through these lines, I can establish relationship to most any REID (not REED) or TARWATER in Daviess County. Related names are numerous including MILLER, McHANEY, WORLEY, BIDDLE, and others pretty much all having resided on the southern half of the Grand River in Daviess County.
To clarify for Daviess County historians familiar with the 1838 Daviess County Early Settler/Mormon Conflict: my Mormon ancestry comes from my maternal line and does not include any Daviess County experience; however, my TARWATERs were among the early settlers of Daviess County--although it is undocumented what role they played in this conflict. I am comfortable and fairly competent in fielding questions on this piece of Daviess County history.

Sending me stuff
I am always grateful for items regarding Daviess County cemeteries. However, please make sure that you own the copyright for the items that you send me (i.e. you made the transcription, you took the pictures, etc.)

A historical summary of this website
This website started out as a simple, incomplete list of cemeteries on the MoGenWeb's Daviess County homepage three years ago in Aug 1998. The list grew and Lori Pownall, the former ~modavies hostess, graciously did the HTML work while I kept at the list. I soon perceived the need to disseminate more information more efficiently. Thus when rootsweb.com made an announcement to provide free, unlimited webspace I took advantage of the offer and on October 28, 1999, began a primitive form of this website. The website is under fairly continual metamorphosis and has a slow, but slightly expanding outreach: during the first year it had over 2300 hits to the main page alone, the second it added another 2700, and so forth.

About this website...
I have a three-fold mission for this website: 1) To disseminate as much Daviess County cemetery information as possible to as many interested persons; 2) To encourage visits to these cemeteries; 3) To promote interest in maintaining and restoring these cemeteries. To the extent these are accomplished will depend heavily on what kind of feedback I get from you. Thanks to rootsweb, this has a free spot on the internet so I don't see it going away. In addition to thanking rootsweb, I wish to thank the several who have contributed items to the Cemetery List and the many others for positive feedback & encouragement.

--Steve Reid
April, 2004

Contact me: Steve Reid