Looking for a little summer excitement? Check out the festival listings on ePodunk! We are continually updating this section for up-to-date information. Search by state for nearby fair and festival dates and websites.

One of our favorite listings is the Wapping Fair that will take place September 7-10, 2006 in South Windsor, CT.

Wapping Fair boasts among this year’s attractions:
“Back by popular demand will be Robinson’s Racing Pigs- The Paddling Porkers! Watch as they swim across a 20′ pool hoping to get their version of a pot of gold–an oreo cookie!”

Take a look, so you don’t miss out on the fun in your community!

ePodunk received some recent press from St. Paul MN’s Star Tribune.

The article reads:

“When it comes to specialized lists about places, it’s hard to beat ePodunk. Its reports have included such esoteric data as where survivors of the Hurricane Katrina disaster have relocated, the number of Starbucks stores per capita (”cities with mo’ joe”) and “best places if you’re 50 and gay.” There’s also typical community data, of course. But the coolest feature lets you see the top U.S. cities for selected ancestries. The highest concentration for those with Ukrainian heritage, for example, is in Cass, Pa., where they make up 14.3 percent of the population. More than 100 ancestry maps are available.”

Check out the full article here.

Ever wonder how many people in your community are of Italian heritage? Or German? or Dutch? Did you know New Philadelphia, PA is 20.8% Lithuanian? Or that Woodlawn, MD is 6.1 % Nigerian? Impress your friends with your new knowledge. Our US site provides ancestry information for every community that’s recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau. You’ll find it by clicking on the “Ancestry and family history” link that appears on each of our community profiles.

Now, you can browse ancestry information with visuals. We’ve mapped communities by heritage, showing the places with the highest proportions of Greeks, Swiss and 103 other ethnic groups. See our new ancestry section.

We try to be accessible as possible, including an email contact link on every page. But access has its price. We routinely field questions from frustrated web users who just want to vent.

A recent example:

“I thought I was stupid until I saw on your page. ‘Don’t find the cemetery you’re looking for? Submit it’. Even stupid me can see tha a person cannot submit something if the person is looking for it- NOBODY CAN BE MORE STUPID THAN YOU PEOPLE!!!”

We responded:
“We receive 50-80 submissions a day from people who know the location of a cemetery that isn’t yet in our database. The genealogy world is very collaborative; we find many of our users go out of the way to supply accurate information. Sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for…”

Some users know the location of the cemeteries they are trying to look up and then are able to submit locations to us. Others submit cemeteries to us just to be helpful (see previous posting “No gravestone left unturned”).

So, if you feel prone to web rage, as most people do at some point in their time on the internet, think about the people at the other end of your email. We’re not all conglomerates. As for ePodunk, we’re thinking about instituting a three-exclamation-point rule. Three or more following a single sentence means we don’t have to reply…

Last week: 6/6/06
ePodunk’s most-visited community page: Hell, Michigan.

Creepy!

We received a helpful cemetery addition the other day from an ePodunk user. After reading the submission about Liedley cemetery in Hanover, MI , we asked a follow-up question about the name spelling. We received this response:

“I was told as a youngster that it was named after a family that once lived there, or near there; a road that runs north and east behind the cemetery is also called by the family name. My grandfather and later my father were sextons to the Hanover townships cemeteries. Now I looked up the cemetery on two different county plat maps; they show the location but not the name. I checked the spelling of the road, in the1996 edition and it is spelled ( Liedley) and in the 2004 edition it is spelled (Leidley)… I drove out there and the sign on the fence is Leidley, but the road sign is Liedley. Same family, two different spellings. But as for your question of the name of the cemetery, it’s Leidley. Sorry for the mistake, but I learned something today too. Never too old to learn. Glad to help.”
-ML, Horton MI.

Thanks for really going the extra mile!

ePodunk receives many emails each day, with comments, suggestions and information to be added to our database. Users frequently ask about the timeliness of our data.

For example, a woman from Twin Falls, ID writes:

“I just wanted email you and let you know you completely are off the mark concerning Twin Falls information. We moved here in November 05 from West Palm Beach, FL expecting lower prices, lower housing, lower groceries, (yes, SOMEWHAT) lower wages but I don’t know where you get your info but it absolutely needs updating…The housing is going up by the day due to the Californians coming here and buying everything in site - then turning them into rentals.”

For communities experiencing dramatic growth, our stats may seem off-base. Here’s why: most of our demographic information comes from the U.S. Census, which is conducted every 10 years. The census was last done in 2000 and will be updated in the year 2010.

We do, however, plan to publish updated estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, scheduled for release in 2006.

We’ve gathered a few of our favorite imaginary places in America from fiction, film and TV and in some cases, we’ve tried to show the connections these made-up places have to real cities and towns.

For example:

• Bedford Falls - Frank Capra, director of the Christmas classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” may have patterned the town after Seneca Falls, NY.
• East Egg & West Egg - The affluent and not-so-affluent neighborhoods on Long Island Sound, depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald wrote the book while living in Great Neck, NY.
• Yoknapatawpha County - William Faulkner set most of his fiction here. Faulkner grew up in Oxford, MS
• more here

Our readers have suggested these additions:

• On the series Roseanne, Lanford, IL is Rockford, IL. Street names, locations, surrounding towns, and even the picture for Dan’s motorcycle shop are all Rockford locations.- RP
• Don’t forget the infamous Cabot Cove, ME, from the TV series Murder, She Wrote. Due to Jessica Fletcher’s presence, it must be the murder capital of the world. From 1984 to 1996 there were 264 murders What’s that, about 1 murder every two-and-a-half weeks? Then in 1996 the murder spree stopped, except for one murder in 2003. - PM
• more here

Have a favorite imaginary place that we’re missing?

Send us a comment here, or email your suggestion to info@epodunk.com

We had no idea when we launched ePodunk in 2001 that Web users had such an interest in cemeteries. But so many people came to the site searching for cemetery locations that we added more than 120,000 cemetery listings compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey.

We recently came up with a cemetery locator tool, enabling our users to submit cemetery locations by clicking on a map. Looking for a cemetery? Think you’ve found a cemetery that no one else knows about? Prove it!

Start at ePodunk, then follow these steps to locate a cemetery or to add one to our database:

1) Search for the community nearest the cemetery
2) Scroll to the heading “Cemeteries” and the link “Add a local cemetery to our listings”
3) If the cemetery you’re looking for isn’t listed, click “Submit it”
4)If you know where it is, click on the exact location in the map below. A popup window will ask you for the cemetery name. Your submission will not show up immediately, so please enter each cemetery only once. Because we review all submissions before entering them in our database, it may take several days before the cemetery appears on ePodunk.

We’ve been adding more than 1,000 cemeteries a month to our database. Thanks to our active and informed Web users who keep our database growing!

The Detroit Free Press mentioned us in a recent story about place names. The article reads:

“According to www.epodunk.com, an Arkansas toothpick is a large bowie knife. You can wash down Georgia ice cream (grits) with Kansas sheep dip (whiskey). Chewing tobacco is West Virginia coleslaw.” - The Detroit Free Press

Full story here