| Founded | 1 July 2009 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jim McKane |
| Type | Registered Charity |
| Location |
|
President | Steve Fulton, UE |
| David Thompson Cliff Seibel Joe Wilson | |
| Website | canadianheadstones |
Canadian Headstones is a project to capture digital images and the complete transcription of cemetery stones. It is a web-based Canadian non-profit corporation run completely by volunteers.
Jim McKane began his genealogical quest in the early 1970s, when his father convinced him to become the custodian of the pedigree for his Lyons Clan Reunion in Chinguacousy Township, Peel County, Ontario. In April 2009, while volunteering as assistant webmaster of a website, he found a website archiving headstones for those who were born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, the home of his ancestors. [1]
Realizing the value of the information to genealogists and family historians, he set out to research the possibility of creating an archive for Canadian headstones. While there were a number of websites storing photos of gravestones, none also included the inscriptions on the gravestones. The majority of existing sites also had either no search engine feature or very poorly constructed search features. The result was the creation on 1 July 2009 of CanadianHeadstones.com. [2]
The bylaws of Canadian Headstones state that the purpose of the corporation is: the corporation shall gather, archive, publish and disseminate genealogical, historical data or other records of interest to family historians, genealogists or other researchers. [3]
Canadian Headstones relies on volunteers, including genealogy enthusiasts, to upload photos. [4] The site steps a contributor through uploading a photo, editing it, choosing a county and cemetery, entering the names and inscription. [5] It is then checked by a coordinator who assists the contributor to fix any problems.
The site also uses a soundex system to allow searches for sound-alike names, to account for spelling variations, typos in entries or degraded quality of older headstones. [2]
The section of the site devoted to Quebec is available in both French and English. [6]
By 2012, CanadianHeadstones.com had 348,000 records submitted to the site and was growing at a rate of 10,000 entries per month. [7] By 2015, the site had more than 1 million records. [8]
The website includes a subproject to photograph gravestones of Canadian soldiers buried in cemeteries abroad, with more than 1,000 graves photographed by January 2015. [9] The site also documented Halifax Memorial at Nova Scotia's Point Pleasant Park, devoted to the Canadian sailors who died during World Wars I and II, with close-up photos of all the panels with the names of the soldiers.
Genealogy is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. The field of family history is broader than genealogy, and covers not just lineage but also family and community history and biography.
Mount Hope Cemetery is a municipal cemetery in Rochester, New York, United States. Founded in 1838, it is the burial site of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. Situated on 196 acres (79 ha) of land adjacent to the University of Rochester on Mount Hope Avenue, the cemetery is the permanent resting place of over 350,000 people. The annual growth rate of this cemetery is 500–600 burials per year.
A gravestone or tombstone is a marker, usually stone, that is placed over a grave. A marker set at the head of the grave may be called a headstone. An especially old or elaborate stone slab may be called a funeral stele, stela, or slab. The use of such markers is traditional for Chinese, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic burials, as well as other traditions. In East Asia, the tomb's spirit tablet is the focus for ancestral veneration and may be removable for greater protection between rituals. Ancient grave markers typically incorporated funerary art, especially details in stone relief. With greater literacy, more markers began to include inscriptions of the deceased's name, date of birth, and date of death, often along with a personal message or prayer. The presence of a frame for photographs of the deceased is also increasingly common.
Tombstone tourist describes an individual who has a passion for and enjoyment of cemeteries, epitaphs, gravestone rubbing, photography, art, and history of (famous) deaths. The term has been most notably used by author and biographer Scott Stanton as the title of his former website and book The Tombstone Tourist: Musicians (2003), about the lives and gravesites of famous musicians.
Find a Grave is a website that allows the public to search and add to an online database of human and pet cemetery records. It is owned by Ancestry.com. Its stated mission is "to help people from all over the world work together to find, record and present final disposition information as a virtual cemetery experience." Volunteers can create memorials, upload photos of grave markers or deceased persons, transcribe photos of headstones, and more. As of 2024, the site claimed more than 250 million memorials.
Fort Gaspareaux was a French fort at the head of Baie Verte near the mouth of the Gaspareaux River and just southeast of the modern community of Strait Shores, New Brunswick, Canada, on the Isthmus of Chignecto. It was built during Father Le Loutre's War and is now a National Historic Site of Canada overlooking the Northumberland Strait.
Interment.net is a United States–based website containing a free online database of transcriptions from headstones, intended to be a research tool for use by genealogists and historians. As of 2006, the site was one of the top 15 free genealogy websites on the Internet. Its cemetery database to date includes more than 6 million cemetery records from around the world.
The Old Burying Ground is a historic cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It is located at the intersection of Barrington Street and Spring Garden Road in Downtown Halifax.
The Centerville Pioneer Cemetery, also known as the Centerville Presbyterian Cemetery or Alameda Presbyterian Cemetery, is located at the corner of Post Street and Bonde Way in Fremont, California. It was officially designated as a state cemetery in 1858 or 1859, depending upon the source, and was listed in the California Register of Historic Resources in 1976.
Kinne Cemetery, also known as the Glasgo Cemetery and Old Kinne Burying Ground, is a historic cemetery in Jarvis Road in Griswold, Connecticut. The earliest marked stone is for Daniel Kinne who died in 1713. In the 1930s, the inscriptions of 79 stones in the Kinne Cemetery were recorded for the Hale Index. There are around 80 fieldstones with no carving or identification, but it is unknown if this stems from wearing of the gneiss stone or that there were no skilled carvers locally available. The seven carvers that have been identified are Lebbeus Kimball, Jotham Warren, Josiah Manning, Peter Barker, Mr. Huntington of Lebanon, E. Marston of Mystic Bridge and O. Doty of Stonington. The National Historic Register of Places nomination notes, "the cemetery is significant artistically because the carving on the stones gives many good examples of the funerary art that was characteristic of the 18th and 19th centuries in New England." The cemetery is notable because of the burial of Isaac C. Glasko, the namesake of the village of Glasgo, and a prominent African American land-holding man who ran a blacksmith shop that was important to the marine industry of the area. The cemetery was made a part of the Connecticut Freedom Trail in 1995 and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 12, 2001.
Findmypast is a UK-based online genealogy service owned, since 2007, by British company DC Thomson. The website hosts billions of searchable records of census, directory and historical record information. It originated in 1965 when a group of genealogists formed a group named "Title Research". The first internet website went live in 2003.
Jews' Gate Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery located on Windmill Hill within a nature reserve in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. Also known as the Windmill Hill Cemetery, it is the site of the earliest known Jewish burials in Gibraltar. The cemetery opened by 1746 and closed in 1848. It is the burial site of a number of Gibraltar's Chief Rabbis. The graveyard is protected by the law of Gibraltar.
The Ontario Genealogical Society, operating as Ontario Ancestors since early 2019, is the largest organization devoted to research into family history in Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1961 as a Registered Charity corporation, the Society has grown by 2020 to include 30 local branches covering all of Ontario and five Special Interest Groups.
Penguin General Cemetery was gazetted a public cemetery in 1897; it overlooks the township of Penguin and the Bass Strait in Tasmania, Australia. It is situated on Main Street, a kilometre west of the town's Post Office, on land originally owned by Reverend W.H. Walton of the Primitive Methodist Church.
The Historical Society of Baltimore County (HSBC) was founded in 1959 with the goal of preserving, interpreting, and illustrating the history of Baltimore County for the benefit of present and future generations of Marylanders, and is a resource for those interested in researching both local and family history. As the HSBC describes it, they "continually accomplish" their mission "through the production of presentations, lectures, workshops, entertaining educational publications, historical tours, and exhibits." Centrally located in Cockeysville, Maryland, the Society operates out of the Agriculture Building, the former Baltimore County Almshouse, which was built in 1872 and used to house the poor and mentally ill of Baltimore County until 1958.
The FamilySearch Research Wiki is a website containing reference information and educational articles to help locate and interpret genealogical records. The wiki is part of the FamilySearch website and was launched in 2007. It is a free-access, free-content online directory and handbook that uses a wiki platform to organize pages. Content is created collaboratively by a member base made up of FamilySearch employees, Mormon missionaries, and the wider online community. As of 2024, pages can be edited only by registered contributors who have completed training on current content policy.
The Genealogy Society of Norway was established on January 12, 1990 and is Norway's largest genealogical organization.
Dutchess County Historical Society, located in Rhinebeck, New York, was formed in Pleasant Valley, New York May 26, 1914 and received its Charter from the Regents of the University of the State of New York in 1918. Its mission is to discover, preserve and share the local area's history and artifacts from the time of its earliest people to the present.
The Old Parish Burying Ground is the oldest protestant cemetery in Windsor, Nova Scotia and one of the oldest in Canada. The graveyard was located adjacent to the first protestant church in Windsor (1788). The oldest marker of Rachel Kelley is dated 1771, twelve years after the New England Planters began to settle the area.
Hebrew Sick Benefit Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery in Winnipeg, Canada. Founded in 1911, it contained approximately 3,500 graves as of 1996. It also contains a war memorial to fallen Jewish servicemen in World War II.
