Parish by parish and diocese by diocese, Atlantic Geomatics hopes to map and photograph millions of graves over the next seven years. Via WiredUK
, Victorian monuments, a narrow stream, and evergreen trees and shrubs. But in 2016, when Viney tried to visit his parent’s gravesites while attending another funeral, he couldn’t find them. “Because there were no marks and they were in a woodland burial ground, you couldn’t get an exact location,” he says.
It is not that there are no maps of cemeteries—it’s just that they are mostly only on paper and out of date. And in that woodland burial ground, the first of its kind in the UK, oak trees have been planted over biodegradable graves, so there are no headstones. Instead, since 1993, the deceased have been remembered with small brass plaques on a nearby wall.
Viney’s experience of searching for his parent’s graves in the 72-acre municipal cemetery in Carlisle sparked an idea. “I thought it would be quite good to be able to find people easily,” he says. His company has now taken on the task of mapping every churchyard and municipal burial ground in England—a total of more than 18,000—to create a Google Street View of graveyards in which descendants, genealogists, and conservationists can click on a map and see who was buried there and when.
Viney knows his way around maps. The surveyor worked for more than 20 years in different parts of the world, from the Caribbean to the Middle East, before returning to Cumbria in England. In 2002, Viney took over a surveying company with three employees and renamed it Atlantic Geomatics.
It takes about a week to process the hundreds of thousands of measurements and create an accurate map of a graveyard. A different team will then go to the same site with better-quality cameras to photograph all the headstones and memorials. Original records of baptisms, marriages and burials, some dating hundreds of years back, will also be scanned and linked to the appropriate grave on the 2D map. Each parish can then continuously add new graves and records.
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