Shoot 'Em All

When I make a trip to a cemetery to photograph the gravestones of ancestors, I'm usually coming from at least two hours away so I want to make the trip worthwhile. As long as I'm there, I might as well photograph as many stones as possible. There are actually several reasons I do this - one of which is because there may be related stones nearby that may fit into the family tree. I also take the extra shots because I want to document the graveyard itself for the sake of others' research. So, typically, I'll come back from a trip with several hundred photographs needing to be identified.

Since I use a digital camera, it's very easy to take lots of pictures quickly, but the identification process takes quite a bit longer at time. My typical process is to import all the pictures into a single directory on my computer, and then copy them into individual folders for each cemetery. Within the individual folders, I create two new directories: Working and Done. The photos get copied again into the Working directory, where they are cropped if necessary and then resized for posting to the web. As each one is identified and uploaded to my genealogy program, I move it to the Done folder. Over time, the Working folders get emptied, but it may take a long time in some cases, because I don't upload the photos until I have tied the individual into an existing family within my database.

Typically, I'll take pictures in rows, so that the related stones are in the order in which they appear in the graveyard. Sometimes, they're be in adjacent rows, in the case of a larger family plot, but the idea is the same, to keep the family members together in the pictures. This helps to identify them later, as the numbers of the photographs will show their relative placements.

Sometimes, these nearby stones can reveal additional relationships. I was recently at Spring Hill Cemetery in Cumberland county, PA and found the stone within the family plot for my great-grandmother's sister and discovered that she had apparently remarried several years before she died. Her stone was there, next to her sister and brother-in-law, but with a surname I didn't recognize. I still don't know who her second husband was, since there was no stone for him nearby, but eventually he'll be found, I suppose.