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morenewsat11 t1_iyxqmma wrote

>Viney’s experience of searching for his parent’s graves in the 72-acre municipal cemetery in Carlisle sparked an idea. “I thought it would be quite good to be able to find people easily,” he says. His company has now taken on the task of mapping every churchyard and municipal burial ground in England—a total of more than 18,000—to create a Google Street View of graveyards in which descendants, genealogists, and conservationists can click on a map and see who was buried there and when.

...

>It takes about a week to process the hundreds of thousands of measurements and create an accurate map of a graveyard. A different team will then go to the same site with better-quality cameras to photograph all the headstones and memorials. Original records of baptisms, marriages and burials, some dating hundreds of years back, will also be scanned and linked to the appropriate grave on the 2D map.

Amazing undertaking. That headline doesn't do justice to what Viney is building.

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Cheap_Amphibian309 t1_iyy4tcr wrote

I image some serious crowd sourcing will be used as well

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SlapunowSlapulater t1_iyyjogu wrote

It's called findagrave.com.

You can search anestry.com from it for the records mentioned above.

This guy seems to be duplicating an existing effort. Why not just volunteer to update that database instead?

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Buckwheat469 t1_iyylel3 wrote

I used findagrave.com to help my grandma find her father's grave in Oregon. Findagrave listed a location and had the image. We walked to the spot and it was someone else's grave. My grandma remembered it being by a tree, the only tree in the cemetery, but it wasn't there either. Then we went to the cemetery registry sign and found it in a different location. A bit of searching later and we found it in a completely different row than what the registry sign said. This is when I realized that they're just moving grave stones around, so you're likely not even standing next to your loved one sometimes.

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CoziestGhost t1_iyyzkle wrote

I can 100% guarantee you they are not “just moving gravestones around.”

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Yes-Eggplant-3551 t1_iyzcz3e wrote

Yes, because gravestones are notoriously easy to move around, like Guess Who.

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Cheap_Amphibian309 t1_iyzuo6f wrote

Does findagrave have gps coordinates?

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SlapunowSlapulater t1_iz086oe wrote

Yes it does if they are entered by the photographer.

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Cheap_Amphibian309 t1_iz094c7 wrote

Looks like a lot don’t (from the few I looked up). I think have coordinates would be very beneficial especially considering people may forget exactly where their loved ones are and have to spend time walking around looking for them.

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