HELPFUL LINKS for Cemetery Preservation, Images and Misc. Information:
Cemetery Preservation
- Cemetery Preservation page at the Chicora Foundation web site; see also the pages on conservation (appropriate and inappropriate treatments), cemetery fences (ornamental ironwork), cleaning stones, resetting, cemetery recording forms.
- Saving Graves: "Working together to preserve America's endangered cemeteries", with detailed information on every state, including cemetery laws and action alerts.
- Comprehensive sites: listing thousands of cemeteries in the U.S. and elsewhere, often with links to interment lists:
- Theme sites:
- The Political Graveyard, my own locator for dead politicians.
- Dead Presidents, with photos of burial sites and biographical info.
- Hollywood Underground, with "The Burial Sites of Hollywood's Most Famous Movie Stars, Moguls and Eccentrics!"
- GraveNet, a project to give K-12 students an opportunity to investigate community history, geology, etc., through cemeteries, by providing lesson plans and other resources.
- Cemetery Studies: taking 8th grade classes on cemetery field trips.
- alt.society.funerary, Usenet newsgroup.
- Grave-L, a mailing list for taphophiles: "Grave-L focuses primarilly on the sociological, anthropological, historical, artistic, spiritual, folklore, and other nonmorbid aspects of cemeteries and sepulchral culture. We're not a Goth or horror list, though persons with such interests are welcome to join and participate in the discussion. Genealogists should be aware that we aren't much of a help for cemetery look-ups, though you can always ask."
- CEMETERY-L: "An 'Old Bones' mailing list for people interested in the many aspects of family graves from caring for the grave of one ancestor to the restoration and preservation of the family cemetery. Areas of discussion will center around the restoration, preservation, and recording of small cemeteries and will include cleaning and repairing broken headstones and recording headstone inscriptions, how to better read old headstones, and determining where ancestors are buried. This is not a list for cemetery lookups."
- Cemeteries (long established worldwide links page, based in Germany).
- Cemetery Culture: City of the Silent, "The Web's most extensive cemetery site," has many annotated links.
- Joseph Culligan's Cemeteries page.
- Cemeteries (formerly "World Wide Index of Cemeteries on the Net").
- Cemeteries, Memorials, and Ancient Burials on Webster's Death, Dying and Grief Resources site, with a huge number of interesting links.
- The Tombstone Tourist.
- The Sepulcher, with many cemetery and related links.
- Dark Side of the Web (page on Cemeteries, Funeral Homes, and Death).
- Geographic list of online cemeteries by Michael Kinsella.
- Yahoo's Cemeteries page.
Organizations and Publications
- Association for Gravestone Studies home page.
- Tomb With A View, cemetery interest newsletter.
- 1Media.org, photo agency, sells CDs of gravestone images, including Jewish cemeteries in Germany, Irish cemeteries, Old German cemeteries. Accepts PayPal.
- Books about cemetery history and preservation from Frontier Press.
- Save Southern Cemeteries, to educate people as to the dangers facing cemeteries (development, neglect, vandalism); locate forgotten cemeteries; transcribe as many cemeteries as possible; prevent the destruction of cemeteries in the South; encourage legislation to protect cemeteries; encourage community groups to adopt neglected cemeteries.
History, Culture, Sociology, and Images
- Farber Gravestone Collection at the American Antiquarian Society; over 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States.
- Cemetery Culture: City of the Silent, "The Web's most extensive cemetery site," with many different categories of information.
- The Art of Dying: Headstone Art of North Carolina
- Cemetery Images, with many photos of cemeteries in upstate New York and elsewhere.
- The Tombstone Traveller's Guide, exploring American cemeteries and funeral practices; photos, stories, essays, research.
- The Undertaker's Grave, with photos from more than a dozen different cemeteries in the U.S. and Canada.
- The Adams Residence, with a cemetery photo gallery featuring sites in England and Europe.
- Cemeteries of Florida, with many cemeteries listed and photographed.
- Cemeteries and the Sociology of Death.
- Second Page of the Dead, with photos and information about a number of crypts and monuments in Europe.
- Mostly Cemeteries, with many nice images of cemeteries in Georgia, California, and elsewhere.
- Cemetery Updating Services, offering record keeping and computerization: "We update cemetery records so anyone can access the information quickly, efficiently and easily."
- Gate City Caretakers: "Gate City Caretakers provides landscape gardeners for the upkeep of privately owned perpetual care lots as well as entire cemeteries. Our suggestions are made with sensitivity to historic appropriateness, symbolism, location and the safeguarding of monuments, coping walls and other decorative architectural and landscape features."
- Virtual Underground: cemetery mapping using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR).
- Discover Rods, a dowsing
system for finding lost graves and buried headstones. Lots of folks think its worthwhile. (??)