My name is Bruce. When I tell people a hobby of mine is photographing grave markers, I get some strange looks and questions like; Why? Well, I started doing it for my family history then I discovered www.findagrave.com and volunteered to fill photo requests from other genealogists. At Lilah’s urging, two years, 11,159 graves and 9,500 photographs later I and several others have placed over 16,000 Itasca County graves on the find a grave website. Thousands of digital grave photos have been donated to the ICHS and along with a large obituary file and cemetery books, a family history gold mine is available to researchers in the Karjala Research Center.
What makes cemetery research interesting are the interesting and sometimes odd things we come across such as; Why was a man buried in one plot and his leg buried in another? It’s in the record.