Join the Cemetery Project's January 2015 Free For All Challenge!!

Question

Do you have a pile of tombstone photos from the summer that you want to get uploaded to WikiTree? Or maybe you're in the southern hemisphere and are just getting ready to go out taking pictures? Do you just want something fun to occupy your time in the post-holidays slump?

Then you should join the January 2015 Free For All Challenge!

This challenge includes all types of contributions to the Global Cemeteries Project: get points for photographing tombstones, transcribing tombstones, adding tombstone images to profiles, and connecting those profiles to the big tree!

If you'd like to join, just edit the Participants section of the challenge page and add a section for yourself (you can copy one of the existing sections and then just change the name in it to yours).

I know this is still a while away, but things get hectic in December so I figured it could be helpful to know about this early. :) I'll definitely post reminders closer to the challenge start date.

Reply here if you have any questions and I'll do my best to answer them!

Answer 1

I am new at this.How do we know if the plot was already photographed? What if it was photographed once but now someone else has passed and the pictures may need an update? Do we need permission of the cemetary owner to take pictures of the tombstones? How do we send the pictures to the correct place? Thank you for taking your time with my questions.

Comments

1) The Global Cemeteries Project is split up into subprojects based on country, and then in some countries split up further by province, state, etc. Each subproject keeps track of which cemeteries have been photographed by its members. Eg. here's the progress page for my provincial project, Manitoba Cemeteries.

2) Keeping a cemetery up-to-date is a challenge faced by all groups that attempt a project like this. What I've been doing is recording when I photographed the cemetery. That way, in the future, I or someone else could go through the cemetery faster just looking for deaths after that date.

3) You don't need anyone's permission to photograph tombstones in a public cemetery, but you might for private cemeteries.

4) Once we have the pictures, we transcribe them into a table on a free-space page (eg. St. Jude Church Cemetery) and upload the pictures to WikiTree profiles. If you look at the table in my example, you'll see a couple of the names have links to profiles I've created for them. The photos of their tombstones are uploaded there.

I hope that helps! :)

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Hi Anonymous -- You can also team up with somebody if you don't want to do every step yourself. For example, if you just want to take photos, you can work with someone else who can make the free-space page. FYI -- here is a link to a little cemetery page I made that already has the photos added.http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Bostetter_Cemetery%2C_Delphi%2C_Indiana  I had no idea how to do any of this when I started in September, but Lianne and others helped me all the way. Just ask.

Answer 2

Just adding an answer to bump this question up as a reminder! :)

By the way, if you don't have any tombstone pictures to transcribe or add to WikiTree, and you can't photograph tombstones in January, you can still participate! Check out this discussion on Google+, where some of us are offering to share our abundant pictures with those who want another way of participating in the challenge.