Almost nobody starts with a complete, well-ordered register. Part of the information is in a book, part in a spreadsheet, and part in photos on a phone or in staff members' memory. That is a normal starting point.
Where you can start
Any of these can be a beginning:
a burial book or register, even an incomplete or damaged one;
a spreadsheet or a text list of the people buried;
a folder of photos of monuments taken at different times by different people;
a list of cemeteries in a community or area, with no details at all;
old plans of sections and staff notes.
First step: describe the materials and the result you want
A short email is enough for a first contact:
What you have — the type of materials, their approximate volume and their condition.
Which cemetery or area it concerns.
What you want to achieve — for example, a name search for visitors, preserving an old book or a list of a community's cemeteries.
A first contact needs no personal documents, relatives' contacts or the files themselves. We will reply and suggest a small first step.
What you can do yourself right now
Add a cemetery that is not in the directory yet, and refine its location.
Upload photos of monuments — uploaded photos become burial records that can be transcribed later.
Add a scanned book as a source with its pages — new sources are reviewed before publication.
If the photos are already uploaded and the names and dates are in a spreadsheet, participants with extended contribution rights can attach them through the CSV import, matched by file name. This import does not create memorials and does not transfer section, row and place yet.
A small pilot instead of a large program
For large lists, spreadsheets or digitized registers it is better to start with a pilot:
one cemetery or one book;
an agreed set of fields — name, dates, section, row, place, notes;
a data transfer that we carry out together with you;
checking the result on a few records before the rest.
A pilot shows what works and what should change before a lot of effort has been spent.
What you do not need at the start
A complete or perfectly ordered register.
A dedicated software budget.
Special technical knowledge.
Personal documents or relatives' contacts.
A decision about every cemetery at once.
Write to us
Write to us to organize the collection of materials, join the transcription work or support it — the address is support@