About the Project

The gravestone photographic resource project was set up in 1999 by Charles Sale to photographically record grave monuments and make the information they contain publically available via the internet. Because of the huge scale of the project Charles decided at the outset to restrict the photographs to just those monuments that contain details of people who were born before 1901.

There were a number of reasons Charles decided to start the project:

1. there was not a central resource of grave monument images
2. information from grave monument images was not available for general access
3. every year more and more monuments were being lost because of a variety of reasons such as weathering and vandalism
4. the information contained on a grave monument is often not available from other sources

From the very beginning Charles decided that the resource should be free. A major reason for this decision was that Charles felt that because of the size of the project he needed to encourage others to also volunteer their time to take grave monument photos in their own neighbourhood. This has be partly successful in that during the ten years the project has been running there have been about one volunteer a year who has taken photos for the the project. One voluneer managed to photograph a dozen churchyards but most have just photographed one or two. The vast majority of the images and the work of the resource has been carried out by Charles alone.

On the initial website started in 1999 visitors could download copies of the images directly but as the size and number of images increased the cost of this could not be justified. Now visitors to the site use a web form to order images which are emailed back to them usually within one or two days.

The project website and its associated database has been designed and write by Charles. An important aim of this development was to ensure that the website was easy to use and accessable to all. To this end it has been written in such a way that search engines such as Google are able to index every page. This means that visitors searching for a specific ancestor are easily able to find them within the Gravestone Photographic Resource. Indeed Charles now normally has to deal with about a dozen requests each day. These requests come from all around the world.

Because the project has been running for so long, there are now often times when an image is requested that has also been requested in the past. On these occasions, if the visitor requesting the image has said "yes, I want my details sent to anyone else who has requested this image" Charles will forward their details onto the other person. In many cases this has meant that distant relations have been put in contact with each other.

Although in the early days of the project only about one in ten people bothered to write and thank Charles for the free service he provides, in recent years over 50% now write and thank him.

Apart for the time given to the project by Charles and volunteers, the project has now almost become self-financing by income from donations or the Google ads on the site.