While there are any number of web sites that collect cemetery records and tombstone photographs, our objective is to create a subset of information that specifically relates to our research.

We also want to maintain our information in a way that makes researching our specific families easier. Said simply we want to "cut across" the broader field of cemetery information and focus on just our families.

So when we list a cemetery, we are not listing all information, but only that information that we know relates to our families. We suppliment known links with information we feel has the potential to connect with our family because of proximity of the tombstones in the cemetery, or surname association.

We deviate from our primary objectives by adding two categories of items when we find them. These are tombstones relating to military service and tombstones in such a state of disrepair that if we do not photograph them they may be lost to any researcher.

All of our work is done with a digital camera and the images are then saved to display on the web site. But preparing cemetery images for the internet has proven to be more difficult than we first thought for a number of reasons.

• Cemetery maintenance varies greatly and many tombstones are in a very bad state of repair.
• A surprising number of tombstones seem to be unfinished or incomplete, with partian names and/or parital dates.
• Unless you are going to get down on the ground, many tombstones must be photographed at angles that make them difficult to read.
• The internet is a great way to dissiminate information like photographs, but the images need to be reduced in size to efficiently move them around.
• There are no standards for sizing and naming images, so we needed to establish one for our web site that would last no matter how many pictures we gathered.

If you have an interest in gathering tombsrone information, then we provide a clear example of our process to make it more understandable. On a separate page we walk you through the process which is relatively easy, but time consuming. The process also requires some specialized software as you can see.

See the process.

If you live in an area where one of our cemeteries is listed we are always looking for help with tombstone photographs.