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Our Genealogy Helper

Introduction ...

We have a couple of goals for our Gazetteer:

  • That it be a tool which helps us with planning our trips.
  • We're trying to shape our Gazetteer as a tool to help us understand the community in which our ancestors lived, the community that was part of their daily lives.
  • On our trips, we try to visit those places where our ancestors left their footprints.

By learning about Coalgate (and the surrounding area) during the time that our ancestors lived, we hope to have a better understanding of both their community and its relationship to their lifes. We hope that this tool helps to give us an insight into their world.

As we add data and organize our Gazetteer to help with our family research, we will be adding to this our Genealogical Helper for Coalgate. While we don't have information that is specific to any given person or family, we intend to expand our understanding about where and how people lived.

Neighboring Counties ...

When searching for family records, we have frequently made the mistake of not checking the neighboring counties.

For example, we have great-grandparents who lived in the southwest corner of their home county. During their lives, most hospitals were in the next county to the west. Almost all of the nearby churches and cemeteries were in the county to the south.

So when searching for records, we had our best success by looking in neighboring counties instead of the county in which they lived:  their home county contained property and probate records; the county to the west contained birth and death records; the county to the south contained their burial records. If we hadn't included the neighboring counties, we would have missed many valuable sources of information.

If you're in a similar situation, we hope that the following information helps.

Coalgate is located in Coal County and is the County Seat.

To see how the shape of Oklahoma's counties may have changed over time, we recommend the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.

The following counties adjoin and form the boundaries of Coal County: Atoka, Hughes, Johnston, Pittsburg & Pontotoc.

Below are the counties that are near Coalgate. For each of these counties, we show a sample of those communities that are closest to Coalgate:

For an expanded list of the communities that are closest to Coalgate, see our County-by-County Page for Coalgate.

Cemeteries Near Coalgate ...

Below are cemeteries that are in the vicinity of Coalgate.

This is a new section and is likely to have errors. If you find an error, such as a missing cemetery or we have the wrong name, please let us know. If you know of them, we would also appreciate learning about previous or alternate names.

Although we don't have the information ourselves, if you need information about a burial or interment, photos, transcripts, how to contact the cemetery or local authorities, please visit our list of websites on our Genealogy Helper Page for Coalgate - one of the links might be able to help.

If not found below, our Cemetery List for Coalgate covers a larger area, with the cemeteries listed in alphabetical order.

The following cemeteries are listed based on their distance from Coalgate, with the one closest to Coalgate listed first.

  • Calvary Cemetery
    (Less than 2 miles to the south)
  • Woodman Cemetery
    (Less than 2 miles to the east)
  • Coalgate Cemetery
    (Less than 2 miles to the north)
  • Lehigh Cemetery
    (4 miles [6.4 km] to the south)
  • Old Lehigh Cemetery
    (6 miles [9.7 km] to the south)
  • Lehigh Cemetery
    (6 miles [9.7 km] to the south)
  • Ott Cemetery
    (6 miles [9.7 km] to the north)
  • Nixon Cemetery
    (6 miles [9.7 km] to the west)
  • Davis Cemetery
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the southwest)
  • Sealy Cemetery
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the southwest)
  • Coal Creek Cemetery
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the southeast)
  • Cairo Cemetery
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the northeast)
  • Continue List   (140 more) ...
    • Round Lake Cemetery
      (7 miles [11.3 km] to the northwest)
    • Keel Cemetery
      (8 miles [12.9 km] to the west)
    • Macedonia Cemetery
      (8 miles [12.9 km] to the southeast)

We've also created an expanded list of communities that existed in the 1890's and were located in the area around Coalgate. See our List of 1890's Communities around Coalgate.

Newspapers Published in the Vicinity of Coalgate ...

An ongoing effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has resulted in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

To share their results, the partnership has created the Chronicling America website. The goal of this partnership is to assemble a database about the current and historic newspapers of the United States. This includes a growing collection of scanned images from selected papers. All of it available to the public on their website.

Using information that we've taken from the Chronicling America website, we've identified 60 newspapers that have been published in the area around Coalgate.

We have organized these newspapers into two lists:

  • A Local Newspaper List - focusing on the papers published in the immediate area of Coalgate. There are actually two parts to this list - papers printed in the immediate area of Coalgate and those printed in the larger area surrounding Coalgate.
  • An Extended Newspaper List - a longer list, sorted by paper name and containing those papers published within 30 miles [48.3 km]<3> of Coalgate.

Websites to Help With Your Genealogy Research ...

When we do our genealogical research, we start with the websites from Cyndi's List, FamilySearch and Genealogy Trails. These websites offer the information directly or else point to where you can find it. Their information is open to everyone.

To help you get started, the following links will take you to the pages that are relevant to Coalgate:

Footnotes ...

<1>While we're fans and frequent users of TripAdvisor, you should know that we're also members of the TripAdvisor affiliate program.
<2>The Find-a-Grave website is an excellent research tool with information about a cemetery's location and interments. They also offer a forum for their members which can provide additional help. More information about Find-a-Grave can be found on their website: findagrave.com.
<3>Our distances are not driving distances, but are calculated as a 'point-to-point' distance. A straight line distance ignores things like rivers, canyons, lakes, et cetera - it's truly a line from Point A (ie- Coalgate) to Point B. In other words: 'As the crow flies'.