Tag: gravestone

The Majesty of Side-Lit Gravestones

September 27, 2015 / tim / 1 Comment

“The biggest improvement in my photos since I learned to take the lens cap off.” ~ ajmexico

The next big thing, not only in my own genealogy, but also for the genealogical research services that I will begin to offer this fall, will be gravestone photos lit from the side by an off-camera flash. I’m hard pressed to imagine a better method for photographing gravestones. This method produces higher contrast without recourse to smearing foreign substances onto the fragile monuments with grubby hands. No chalk, no flour, just pure white light. Continue reading

Find-A-Grave Community Day 2014, Part 1: Fernwood Cemetery

October 20, 2014 / tim / 2 Comments

The Lansdowne Find-A-Grave Meetup, gathered at Fernwood Cemetery for Community Day.

The Lansdowne Find-A-Grave Meetup, gathered for Community Day. Photo by sid, annotated by sneakersox.

This past Saturday, October 18th, was Find-A-Grave Community Day. I made myself useful and joined the Lansdowne meetup at Fernwood Cemetery in Yeadon. This fine historic cemetery is located just outside of West Philadelphia. Despite the best efforts of its friendly and helpful staff, 384 unfulfilled requests have been left to accumulate there. Local Find-A-Graver Jenn O. decided to do something about that, and so she organized the Lansdowne meetup using Fernwood cemetery maps that she accumulated after years of research, and burial locations culled from Ancestry.com’s Pennsylviana Church and Town records.

Eleven of us met at the cemetery at 10:00 for introductions, assignments, e-mail exchange, and a group photo. Two additional gravers joined us shortly thereafter. We each went off to separate sections to fulfill our assignments, and occasionally met one another out in the field and shared our successes. Most of us continued photographing until about two o’clock.

Find-A-Graver CLC cameos in this photo of the Beath family monument.

We didn’t plan to reconvene after the event. For next time, I’m submitting a motion to meet up afterwards for pizza and stories. Despite not having reconvened at the cemetery after the event, we have since re-connected by e-mail, and we are looking forward to future Find-A-Grave meetup events.

Fernwood’s Find-A-Grave stats, as of Saturday morning were 10757 interments and 384 photo requests. It’s current stats, as of noontime, Monday, October 20, are: 11,136 interments and 298 photo requests, and that is despite 11 new requests having been entered since the start of the event. Needless to say, we put a rather large dent in Fernwood’s requests list, and substantially expanded its database. Many thanks to Jenn O. for organizing the meetup, and for my other fellow gravers for their great work!

I was quite pleased with the way many of my own photo contributions turned out. After finishing my assignments there, I rolled on over to my favorite adopted cemetery, Philadelphia National Cemetery, and many took more photos there. Those photos will be the subject of the sequel to this post, due out later this week. For now, enjoy my contributions to Find-A-Grave Community Day with the Lansdowne Meetup!: Continue reading

Moderate Alteration: Bringing Out Faded Lettering

August 14, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

I’d file this Find-A-Grave experiment under Moderate Alterations. The first priority here was to make the writing on this weathered gravestone legible. The second priority was to make it so that a person unfamiliar with the original photo would not realize that it had been modified. The last priority was staying true to the original image. As you can see, I’ve tampered with the stone’s color. I think the experiment was moderately successful. Do you? Your mileage may vary. See Mr. Malady’s Find-A-Grave memorial. Value: $20.

52 Ancestors, No. 25: Denis Graham, a Link to the Past

June 29, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

Because this website, and the business it represents, are image-oriented, I try to have some sort of stimulating GIMP work at the top of each post. The cost of this self-imposed policy is that many fascinating family history stories will go overlooked—unless I manufacture some visually stimulating way to represent the story.

Having recently made a bit of a breakthrough on today’s features ancestor, I wanted to write-up here what I had found. I don’t have a photograph of him, though, so I had to get resourceful. Here before you is the grave of Denis Graham, who was the uncle of my great-great-grandfather, John C. Graham. I’m not really one to doctor gravestone images, but since I recently picked up a few new tricks, I thought I’d see how far I could take them.

In this image, I’ve attempted to remove the rain-induced dampness in the original photograph to present the gravestone as if it were dry. The results were middling, in my opinion. Had I attempted this project for a client, I would have given it more time. Since I’m already a week overdue on Ancestor #25, I figured I’d post what I have and move along. The hardest part of this project is putting life back into the engraved flowers. There wasn’t much left in them after removing darkness of color. Continue reading

Moderate Restoration: Cracked Ceramic

November 8, 2013 / tim

The cracked ceramic is a much more straightforward restoration that the weathered ceramic. As before, the original ceramic photograph was presumably attached to the gravestone of this gentleman upon his death in 1927.I took a close-up photo of the image with a handheld digital camera.The restoration clocked in at about 1 hour and 40 minutes.