A Cemetery Visit ….

There are a couple of websites that have set out to document burials and graves in cemeteries worldwide and make them searchable online. I’ve been a member of both of them for a good while, but haven’t ever contributed or used them extensively.

I went into Nottingham the other week for a talk at the archives, so I took the opportunity to go a bit earlier and have a look around Basford Cemetery. I have a handful of ancestors buried there and some have memorial inscriptions so I went hunting for them. While I was there, I thought I’d take some pictures of other headstones and upload them to the sites.

Find A Grave are an American website but cover cemeteries worldwide. They allow users to upload photos of grave markers and they are made public so other contributors can help with the transcriptions. So even if you haven’t any photos to upload yourself, you can still contribute by transcribing which makes the huge database searchable by name. I found my 3x Great Grandparents, Ann and Charles Redfern, buried in a cemetery in Lincoln.

Billion Graves are also American and work in a similar way to Find A Grave. There are two main differences that I can see; one is that you take the photos through their app on your phone, which also geo-tags them, thereby pinpointing the graves exact location, very handy if you are physically searching for it. They are also partnered with companies like FamilySearch and Find My Past so records can be matched up across the sites.

Here’s some of the photos I took: