... but you may need to research an entire cemetery to find them all.
A few years ago, two teenagers managed to inflict at least $150,000 in damage to an ancestral burial ground I am very fond of. It is a rural garden cemetery set in a picturesque hilly landscape. When I first visited years prior, I was fortunate to see the cemetery before more recent severe weather events damaged many of the large old trees. I imagine the cemetery board had a lot of maintenance costs and headaches on their plate even before the vandals arrived.
When news began to trickle out about havoc at this peaceful place, I sat at my computer thinking: I am far away, what can I do? I had already added hundreds of memorials for the cemetery to FindAGrave (as had several others) — the majority of people buried there are probably at least my fourth cousins — but there were still many thousand memorials unlisted, including most of the 200 or so damaged monuments. I did have several datasets for the cemetery at my fingertips, as well as photos taken on previous trips, so I created profiles for the damaged stones.
Once those were in, I kept going.
It took a couple of weeks but within the month, I had ensured that everybody buried in this cemetery had at least an online memorial with their basic vital information and plot location, no matter the current condition of their marker. Given FindAGrave is indexed directly to Ancestry and FamilySearch, this will bring these burials to the attention of descendants who don't already know they are there. And, the plot location information would later prove extremely useful.
I was a bit worried about managing ten thousand FindAGrave memorials. Would it be an administrative burden? Typically only a handful of edit requests come in every few days. Mostly I was hoping that relatives would request that I transfer the memorials to them and these requests do arrive in a slow trickle.
However, I am responsible for the thousands of memorials I seem destined to manage for some years. Basic birth and death year information is good but is not enough to tell a story. The narrative of community and family that our cemeteries preserve is only revealed when relationships between people and the places they have known, as well as historical events, are made clear. At the beginning, I figured doing comprehensive research on an average of three people a day would cover everyone buried in this graveyard in ten years. They would have a stable, internet-permanent, memorial of their lives and connections that no misbehaving adolescent could destroy. While I haven't checked my progress very thoroughly, I am about half way through this project and it has yielded some interesting benefits.
With the plot data in, the ability to quickly identify groups of people buried in the same plots and then research those connections using the standard databases really increased the authority, quality and completeness of the memorial profiles I could produce. Proximity of burials to each other, in the absence of other documentation, provides very strong inferential evidence.
To some extent this is also true for people buried within the cemetery as a whole, and I often link up networks of twenty or thirty people within the cemetery once I start working on the one or two memorials that have new edit requests. Unmarried people, apparent 'strays' to the community and people with very common names have all been correctly identified and biographied once their presence in the family plot revealed the crucial evidence about who they actually were.
I prioritize which memorials to work on based on edit requests I receive and photo requests for the cemetery as a whole, and this is a nice unsystematic system that rarely feels like a burden. I don't have an obligatory list of things to do on a fixed timeline and typically only login when I have some time to spare and boredom to cure, and in each case it seems like I am helping someone crack a mystery.
Burial proximity can also provide the logical evidence needed to exclude inaccurate relationships. A few edit requests did not add up because it was clear the persons involved could not have been, say, married, given that the person I managed was buried next to their spouse (as identified on the gravestone or by the burial register) and the date arrangements didn't work. Often, I could use local knowledge to point the other researcher to the correct burial elsewhere and thereby untangled incorrect death registration attributions (which can easily happen for Ontario records during the period when parents and spouses were not listed and many cousins with similar names and dates lived in this community).
I won't know for sure if the breakthrough evidence is there until I've researched the whole thing.
