Locating that ancestor’s headstone can be quite rewarding, with information you might not have known before, along with nearby graves of other relatives. You can’t always go directly to a family hometown to visit the cemeteries. The next best thing is to use the ‘Find-A-Grave‘ site online. Here people have take the time to photograph headstones in cemeteries of the towns they live in. Those images then get posted with any other information relating to the decease, many times even a listing for the local obituary. The site has the famous and everyday citizens, some 121 millions grave listings. Images come from some 400,000 cemeteries in the United States and overseas nations also.
A special day, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2014, has been scheduled for thousands of people to go to their local cemeteries to photograph headstones that will then be added to the site. This will be quite a boost to the total number of images available and benefit so many researchers around the globe.
It is being called a Global Community Meet-up, Oct. 18th. Full information of how you can participate in your ow community is listed on the site ‘Global Community Meet-up‘. You sign-up to help, then look at the list of cemeteries (including those in countries outside the USA) that headstones need to be photographed. Narrow down to your local county and a list then appears showing all the cemeteries in that county and approximately the completed percent of photos of headstones in each cemetery. The whole family or siblings or friends could make it is a nice all-day outing.
After the day’s shot, just upload the images (done in JPG format) and any information you gathered to the Find-A-Grave site. It can also be done on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. A wonderful way to give back to the community by preserving the information on the headstones and also sharing those images with countless people who otherwise could not ever see the marker for their ancestor.
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