Volunteers

The gravestone photographic resource project is an attempt to provide a much needed on-line resource for family historians.

The initial project aim was to place online details of all UK gravestones or monuments that are currently legible for people born before 1901. The project has now been extended to cover other countries and now includes grave monuments from Australia, Canada and Cyprus.

All the work of the project is carried out by volunteeers. They take the photographic images and produce the input that is used to produce the project’s data base and web pages.

The project initially concentrated on East Anglia where its main volunteer (founder) was based. He has already indexed both church and municipal cemetaries in Suffolk and Norfolk.

The timetable for other areas will be very dependant upon where other volunteers are based and how much time they can give to the project.

You can help by becoming a volunteer.

Becoming a volunteer

Taking the Photos

The most important item of equipment you require to become a volunteer is a digital camera. The other bit of equipment you will need is a PC with a cd-writer. The only other equipment that you might need is an old soft brush to gently remove any moss or lichen that sometimes makes the monuments difficult to read. A paint-scrapper can also be used for this purpose provided it is used with care so that the monuments are not damaged. However in general it is better not to touch the monument at all.

When you visit a churchyard always make sure that the first image is of something showing the church name and location – normally there’s a board near the entrance or if it’s a disused church there’s a notice in the porch. Then take a few images of the church itself from a variety of views – one of these will be used for the website page.

Then attempt to photograph all the monuments for people born before 1900 – if they are so worn as to unreadable omit them. The watershed of 1900 has been chosen to make the make the project more attainable. However, if any other photos are taken they will also be added to the project database.

Please use the finest setting on your camera as it them makes it easier to enlarge the images on a computer. By doing this names and dates will appear that cannot always be seen by the naked eye.

After taking the images they need to be transferred to your PC. It is helpful if you create a folder called “gravestone photos” and within this folder create separate folders of each churchyard you photograph. Store all the images for a particular churchyard in a separate folder named after the village. If the churchyard is from a town with several churchyards then create a folder with the name of the town and then create sub-folders with the names of the churches.

Extracting information from the images

Besides taking photos of the actual monuments, an equally important job that needs to be done before the information they contain can be added to the website is the extaction of the person information. However if you do not feel confident or have the time to index photos then please just send us some photos.

The information that needs to be extracted for each person named on a monument is as follows:

• surname
• forenames
• year of death
• age
• year of birth
• relationship to the first person named on the monument

The easiest way to store details of the images for each graveyard is on a spreadsheet. At the bottom of this page is an example spreadsheet to show you how to save the information for each image. Each graveyard should have its own spreadsheet that should be stored in the same folder as the images. If you are able to do this information extraction it would be of huge help to the project.

When extracting data from your photos use a photo editing program to look at each image. Images that are taken in portrait mode need to be rotated by 90 degrees.

By using your photo editing program’s zoom feature you will often be able to read names and dates that are hard to read with the naked eye.

For each image record a portion of the photograph file name number. In the example spreadsheet below the first filename was “img_2413.jpg” and just the “2413” was used. The “type” column shows the relationship between the names on the monument:

Getting your images to the project

Once you have some photographs and hopefully extracted the data from them, you need to:

1. copy them to a CD-Rom
2. post the CD-Rom to the Gravestone Photographic Resource

The contact details for posting you CD-Rom is as follows:

Charles Sale
Gravestone Photographic Resource
6 Harrop Dale
Carlton Colville
Lowestoft
SUFFOLK NR33 8UY
England

The Gravestone Photographic Resource will refund the cost of the postage and the CD-Rom if required.

Example Spreadsheet