Latter-day Saints join gravestone preservation effort

If you are searching for the grave of a friend or a family member, you might be interested in the project Rescuing Our Roots.

Janelle Oxborrow of Poplar Bluff and her friends are participating in the program. Oxborrow is the Family Search Center Director for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Katie Lane.

“One of our church leaders asked for someone to take the lead on the project for our area,” Oxborrow said. “I volunteered, as I serve in the family history area and have a spent many years (35+) in helping to preserve historical records.”

The project involves eight stakes, geographic areas of the church, which according to Oxborrow is comparable to a Catholic diocese, in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois.

“There are two goals within the project,” she said. “One goal is to take photos of and transcribe one million headstones. The other goal is to have at least 10,000 people upload a photo by June 25. The transcription goal has already been met and the goal has been increased to two million. Last I checked photos taken numbers were nearing 700,000.”

Oxborrow wanted to start with cemeteries in Poplar Bluff for a couple of reasons.

“First, it is in close proximity to our church, and second, permission was easy to receive,” she said.

Selecting and cleaning headstones to photograph required special care.

“We only clean when it is necessary in order to take a good photo,” Oxborrow said. ”Our first trip out we chose a newer section to get a feel for what we were doing. This last time we started working on the older ones as there is a greater need to document them before they deteriorate more. Some are already worn to the point they are unreadable. More work will need to be done to try and recover the lost information. The long term goal is to have photos of all the graves. This will be an ongoing, long term project.”

The group has special guidelines to use in cleaning headstones.

“Our group does not have much of a budget so we stick with water and tools that won’t damage the stone, such as plastic scrapers and brushes,” Oxborrow said. “There are folks out there who are very knowledgeable in the area of cleaning. I’m not one of them. Our main goal is to document the headstones more than to clean and beautify. “

Oxborrow and her team of 15 volunteers are members of the congregation who were able to come out on Saturday and they ranged in age from 18 months to over 80. There were six young men who had been out camping, a local doctor and his family, two retired military members and spouses, a podiatrist’s family, and a teacher from Three Rivers College.

“Anyone is welcome and encouraged to join in,” she said. “The more people who are involved the larger the impact we can make. This can be done as church groups, individuals, families, etc.”

The project has several sponsors and is being done for Billion Graves. The app and all the basic services are free of charge.

Billion Graves is described as an alternative to Find a Grave, which was created along the same lines as Wikipedia. It is a place where anyone can post but there is no true documentation for the information. It is used quite regularly for doing family history but the accuracy can be tricky. To illustrate the point, a headstone with information that belonged to three different people all with the same name was listed at the same site. Billion Graves has GPS-linked cemetery data resource and the transcribing is done by one person with a second person checking the work. This makes for a more accurate record.

This project is meant to help families find their ancestors and grow their family trees. As volunteers take photos with the Billion Graves app, each gravestone is automatically marked with a GPS location. The data is then transcribed by volunteers, plotted on cemetery maps and made readily available at billiongraves.com. The cemetery maps also allow future volunteers to see exactly what has already been photographed.

The link to the project is billiongraves.com/rescue.

Anyone who is interested in organizing a project in their communitie can contact volunteer@billiongraves.com or reach out to Oxborrow through the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 573-785-0211.