Next of kin own them.”Ĭriminal statutes protect graves from disturbance or desecration, but not from being photographed, said Marsh. “That’s interesting, considering that as a rule, cemeteries don’t own the headstones. “A lot of cemeteries have signs that say you can’t take photographs and publish them without consent of the cemetery,” she said. Laws pertaining to cemeteries tend to be old and unclear, said Tanya Marsh, a Wake Forest University professor who teaches courses on the subject and authored the book, The Law of Human Remains. Internet-immortality ventures, however, are not without controversy, often centering on privacy issues. Revenue is generated from advertising that appears on memorial pages, and various fees may be charged to keep pages ad free. lays claim to more than 6 million.Īccess to the sites is free. , owned by a firm that creates genealogical research technology, boasts 120 million records. In 2013, it was purchased by, a Utah-based network of genealogical websites with an aggregate of 17 billion historical records.įindagrave isn’t the only enterprise dispatching legions of volunteers to cemeteries to photograph headstones or transcribe information from them for online posting. Jim Tipton, a Salt Lake City aficionado of celebrity resting places, started Findagrave in 1995. ” … And the past is a building block to who you are.” “You are connecting people to their past,” said Russ Dodge, 46, of Conshohocken, a senior curator with the site. Requests for headstone hunts gladly accepted, no charge. They have referred to their labors as “genealogical kindness,” of particular service to people researching family trees. They use digital cameras and cellphone apps that tag photos with the graves’ GPS coordinates. The site’s contributors range from working moms who squeeze their cemetery shoots in on weekends, to genealogy buffs undeterred by winter’s bite or summer’s burn, to Boy Scouts working on merit badges. These include cemetery and burial listings with birth and death dates and, if available, biographical information and photos of the deceased - all of which the volunteers upload to create online indexes and individual memorial pages for dearly departed total strangers. In little more than two decades, Findagrave has accumulated not only the gargantuan gallery of headstones, but also 150 million grave records. “In 30 years, someone might steal a stone, or the weather may diminish it, but the internet never goes away.” “This is family history, world history, and preservation,” said Nielsen, 42, a church archivist and historical reenactor.
She pedals through the gates of a cemetery, selects a section of graves, takes out her camera, and snaps a picture of every tombstone she passes, row upon row upon row.Īs a contributor to the website, Nielsen, of Lansdowne, is one of thousands of volunteers who are preserving images of headstones worldwide, expanding a digital repository that reportedly already holds 100 million photographs.
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