Understanding Name Discrepancies on Headstones

This Wednesday I had the pleasure of chatting with the sexton of the largest municipal cemetery in the United States: Salt Lake City Cemetery. With over 120,000 graves inside, it’s quite the area of responsibility to look after and care for. The sexton was very open to sharing some of his experiences with me, and there was one aspect of his work that I found interesting: sometimes the name on someone’s headstone is not the name they went by, or even their official name.

This name discrepancy can even exist within cemetery records—sometimes the sexton has the official name recorded, but the “unofficial” name gets put on the headstone. Most of the time this isn’t the case, but the SLC sexton has known it to happen often enough that it’s worth mentioning.

The reason behind these discrepancies is that what goes on the headstone is 100% the surviving family members’ decision. What the family puts on the headstone is what makes the most sense to them, and sometimes that means using a personal, in-the-family name on the grave monument.

This makes sense. However, if you’re looking for hard facts to put into your family tree, it can cause you a bit of a hiccup if the headstone record doesn’t match the other sources you already have (or other sources you find further down the research road). Even so, having these not-so-official names (or official names that defy what the deceased individual was called in life) can give you an interesting peek into the family relations or traditions of your ancestors. You can learn about a nickname, understand a personal quirk, or uncover a family dispute (the sexton said that sometimes, sadly, he’ll see mourning families divided over what to put on the headstone because everyone feels so close to the deceased).

Knowing what’s on someone’s headstone gives you a glimpse at his or her circumstances in the last times of their life. It can help you see them as a person instead of a name on a chart, or understand family dynamics from the past. This is part of the reason why photos are such an integral part of BillionGraves. Abbreviated records (or official records) may not capture the same character and personality that many headstones can portray. When you can see the actual stone, just as though you were in the cemetery yourself, you can gather information and impressions you couldn’t get from just a name and a pair of dates.

Name discrepancies in old records can be frustrating, but even when your sources don’t completely support one another, each one can add to the past-filled family portrait you try to paint with your family research. When it comes to getting to know your family, every little bit helps.

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The headstone photo was taken in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Turning the headstone into a sort of mountain sculpture adds character, don’t you think?

Free App & First Winners

Yesterday version 1.2 of the iPhone app was released, so the app is now free. I’ll talk more about the new features in the app in a bit; first I want to talk about some amazing people.

First, a big thank you to everyone who uploaded photos over the weekend. We’ve had our strongest four days ever, with thousands of photos uploaded every day.

Second, an equally big thank you to our expertly efficient transcribers, who seem to keep up just fine with the increase in uploads.

Third, a thank you and congratulations to our first t-shirt winners, DSWillett, Gableboy, and Mitchowl. All three of them have crossed the 1,000-photo threshold and have earned their BillionGraves t-shirt for the August promotion. (They’re also sitting quite comfortably at the top of the Leaderboard.) Awesome job, you three. I’m amazed at what you were able to do in only eight days.

Now that we’ve taken a moment to acknowledge everyone who keeps new information pouring in to BillionGraves, we have a chance to talk about the update for the iPhone app.

Version 1.2 has several enhancements, but there are a few you’ll notice more than the others:

• Faster photo taking
• Ability to add a cemetery using an address (in case you can’t get to the cemetery and add it using your current location)
• The dashboard displays your transcription count along with your other counts
• A link to the User Guide from the Settings view (in case you have any questions while you’re using the app)

The last, most drastic improvement to the app is the optional feature expansion available for a $2.99 in-app purchase (if you’re updating to version 1.2 from an earlier version you get the expansion automatically). This expansion bundle is called Records View. I’ve mentioned it before, but in case you missed the explanation, Records View unlocks three main options:

• Search records that have already been transcribed from within the app (searching on the website is still, of course, free).
• View a list of transcribed records whose GPS tags are near your current location.
• View an already transcribed photo on the map along with your current location (this makes it easy to navigate to a headstone in an unfamiliar cemetery).

Records View allows you to access and utilize the information, photos, and records on the BillionGraves database in new and useful ways. I hope all of you who unlocked it automatically by updating enjoy the new feature bundle, and that those of you who are new to BillionGraves will consider adding this tool to your research toolbox.

In a Dozen Days

It’s always interesting to see your progress, regardless of the task at hand. So we’re posting a progress report for BillionGraves. Here are our numbers after the first dozen days of work:

Photos: 8084+ (variation allowed for the time it took me to write this)
Records: 11108+ (the number keeps changing each time I check it)
Photos awaiting transcription: 500–600 (this number also keeps changing)

There are more records than photos because a record refers to one individual’s information. So a couple that is buried under the same monument produces two records, one for each individual. Some of these individuals, like Carl J. Anderson (Provo City Cemetery, Utah, U.S.A.), I wasn’t able to find on the major grave registration sites. Now they’re available for current and future descendants. While these numbers are still relatively small, they represent a strong 12-days introduction.

We’re not sure how many cemeteries have been added to the database since the launch because once we approve an added cemetery, it becomes identical to the cemeteries we originally had on file. I can, however, tell you about the cemeteries we have in the queue for approval. There are currently 16 of them.

• 13 are in the United States, and they come from 8 different states.
• 1 is in Ontario, Canada.
• 1 is in United Kingdom, England specifically.
• 1 is in Croatia.

(Side note: The approval process goes much faster if cemeteries are added with phones that are currently in the cemetery.)

Together, everyone using BillionGraves has, on average, made the headstones of 925 individuals available to descendants worldwide each day the site has been up and running. I wish I could thank you all individually for the contributions you’ve already made, both in photos and in transcriptions, but for now a sweeping “Thank you all” will have to do. We’re hopeful that more and more people will find and contribute to BillionGraves, and the numbers can only go up.