Tony Ho Tran in Slate: It’s a good way to spend a Saturday morning—if, admittedly, a strange one. I wake up and pack a tote bag with leather gardening gloves, a water bottle, a towel, and headphones. Then I drive to one of Chicago’s 272 cemeteries and spend hours taking pictures of the dead.
I do this once a month or so. Alongside shots of my dog and gym selfies, my phone’s camera roll is filled with photos of gravestones of all shapes, sizes, and materials: massive granite monuments fit for the Chicago industrialists buried underneath them, humble flat markers that I’m prone to tripping over, and sandstone slabs so worn down by centuries of sun, rain, and snow that there’s no telling who’s buried there.
I should say: It’s not just me. The photos I take end up on a website called FindaGrave.com, a repository of cemeteries around the world. Created in 1995 by a Salt Lake City resident named Jim Tipton, the website began as a place to catalog his hobby of visiting and documenting celebrity graves. In the late 1990s, Tipton began to allow other users to contribute their own photos and memorials for famous people as well. In 2010, Find a Grave finally allowed non-celebrities to be included. Since then, volunteers—also known as “gravers”—have stalwartly photographed and recorded tombstones, mausoleums, crosses, statues, and all other manner of graves for posterity.
Think of it like a social media site, but for the dead. People can use it to “visit” the graves of their loved ones—in some cases, maybe even for the first time. But it’s not just for mourning or nostalgia: The revelations held in cataloged graves have proven vital for everyone ranging from historians to journalists to your aunt who is really into your extended family’s history. And there is a lot of information. More than a million contributors add thousands of new memorials and photos by the hour.
This graving free-for-all has caused some controversy over the years. Find a Grave—now owned by Ancestry.com, with a commercial interest in its operation—has a moderation team that works to ensure the new graves are real, the bios are correct, and people’s requests get doled out appropriately. But this team is a decentralized crew of volunteers, many of whom are older folks doing this in their spare time. Things can get weird—and they have. After all, how jarring would it be to find out that someone had created a memorial to your dead relative and posted it online without your knowledge or consent?
I should know. It happened to me.
Before I was ever a graver myself, one of my now-comrades in Texas wrote a memorial to a man on Find a Grave. It waited for me there until I decided to uncover one of the mysteries of my family’s past. When I did, I wasn’t quite ready for what I found. Like many other gravers, I’ve come to understand personally the compulsion behind it—and all a simple discovery can do to a person still among the living.
More here.
