Topic and Source Searching, As Well As Some Headaches

The topic I decided to research this semester is death and dying in Portugal. My research question is "How do the Portuguese observe rituals of death, historically and in present times, and how have these customs changed throughout history". My plan of attack for this project was to focus on the history of death rituals and especially on how they have changed over time. Not only did I want to focus my research on Portugal but I wanted to expand it to include Portuguese colonies to better understand how rituals would have been influenced by outside forces, or how being away from the homeland affected the customs of death. I really want to be able to organize my research into a sort of timeline presentation by the end of this project, that way to better show of the changes that took place and to focus not only on present day traditions but also the past.
All of these ideas sounded great when I was first developing my project idea. Even the first few steps of researching went well. So far I have found several articles, websites, and a couple books with information regarding death customs in Portugal. Yet when it came to looking at Portuguese colonies, the information was a bit harder to find. Many of the sources are also catering to a specific religion, although they are still about Portugal's customs. I came across my sources using the library database, mostly Jstor, and searching Google. I also perused Kent Library and Mobius online catalogues to find some useful books. The most difficult part about finding anything was trying to form keywords to search. Some combinations worked, while others provided no usable sources. This was frustrating and resulted in some headaches but when I would finally find a good source, all the frustration was worth it.
So far this week I have not been able to jump to far into the material. I had to wait for my books that I ordered from Mobius to get to campus; they finally did Friday and I am going to start reading through them in the next day or two. I have browsed back through some of the websites I found on my first initial day of source looking and found them to be useful for the present death rituals in Portugal. One website, Cardinal Funeral Homes Ltd. (http://www.cardinalfuneralhomes.com/services/etiquette.aspx), has information on the proper etiquette to use during a funeral and if you scroll down in the box there is a section entitled "Portuguese Visitation and Funeral Traditions" that instructs you on what to do during a funeral in Portugal. Another site, Angloinfo, Death and Dying in Portugal (http://portugal.angloinfo.com/healthcare/death-dying/), describes the steps to take when reporting the death of a loved one and the process that comes after the death. Both of these sites have helpful information about the rituals that are in place in Portugal today when it comes to death and dying and will be useful when I go to compare these traditions to those of the past.