Find a grave

I have become addicted to walking through cemeteries and looking for tombstones of people I do not know.  I am a volunteer photographer for findagrave.com.  It is so fun.  If you do not know what it is about, I will try to describe it.  Find a grave, is like a virtual cemetery. People can go there and look up ancestors and see if they are there.  All the information that is on the site has been put there by volunteers and people that have made virtual memorials for their family members.  A lot of people use it as a tool for genealogy, but I think some people use it as a way to "visit" their relatives that have passed on.  You can leave flowers and such for people, just like you might at a real cemetery.  While other have the passion of looking for famous tombstones. Anyway, if you are a volunteer photographer like me, you can receive requests from people who would like to have a picture of the tombstone of their family member.  The city cemetery here has many requests, and more keep getting added.  So when I have the time, I drag the kiddos with me and we walk the cemetery and look for tombstones.  I really enjoy it, and I have been able to find several tombstones that have been requested.  The woman who works in the office at the cemetery knows me, as I email her frequently to have her look up new requests for me and tell me an approximate of where the people are buried in the cemetery.  If you have time and you enjoy walking through cemeteries, you should really check it out. I was surprised by how many requests I get in this small little town.  And there are several cemeteries in this county, that also have photo requests, that I haven't even begun to try to find yet.  I usually drag the kids with me, and it usually bores them after a short time, but today the weather was great, and the kids loved being outside and walking through the cemetery.  I had to capture some photos of Annie, because she was just so adorable, I should have taken some pics of the bigger kids, but I got plenty of them at the park later (I will post those later).

Another cool thing you can do if you enjoy walking through cemeteries is billiongraves.com.  You need a smart phone, but what you do is download a free app, and then take pics of all the tombstones.  The app downloads the pic and the gps coordinates for the tombstone to the billiongraves database, and then volunteers transcribe the information so that it can be searchable.  I have not tried it yet, as I do not have a smartphone, but I am getting one soon, so I will check it out and see how it works.