Caring for God’s Acre have received funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England with additional financial support the Church of England and the surveying company AG Intl. AG Intl are currently mapping Church of England churchyards using a digital system, and our role is to recruit and enthuse people to use these maps through the Our Digital Ancestors project.
The digital maps of churchyards produced by AG Intl will hold records of all visible monuments including a photo, details of names and dates of those memorialised and scans of birth, death and marriage registers on a churchyard-by-churchyard basis. Once people know how to use the system, they can add additional information such as the wording of the inscription, the monument shape, stone type and condition. It’s also possible to add other relevant bits and pieces including scans of photos, articles from old newspapers or extracts of written material. Once complete these churchyard plans will be openly available for anyone to look at and explore online.
The AG Intl. system is a database and so can be used to search for specific information. The possibilities for local historians and those tracing their family history are enormous, but we hope that this project will also catch the imagination of a new audience keen to uncover stories and understand their communities. Some examples of searches which could be done using the maps:
- Find everyone with a particular surname memorialised in a churchyard to trace a family or all those who were born and died in a specific year or decade to look at life expectancy or population.
- Look at general trends like life expectancy and see how that changes with advancements in medicine and public health
- Discover the human stories of catastrophic events such as rail disasters or shipwrecks.
- Investigate migration e.g. discover Welsh miners near English mines or the range of nationalities found memorialised in a churchyard close to a shipping port.
The educational opportunities of this mapping system are exciting; we will engage with schools to use these maps for learning on a range of topics from the science of the actual mapping process through geography, history and the use of a database. We will run school sessions during the project and also provide legacy resources so they can continue to use the local map for learning, both in the classroom and out in the churchyard itself.
AG Intl. have started mapping churchyards, Carlisle and Truro will be the first two dioceses to be completed.
Through Our Digital Ancestors we will bring this work to life, galvanising local action and volunteering so that as many people as possible know about this amazing system, are learning from it, using it to research further and adding additional content. We will have two staff working on this project – Dr Josie Wall is the manager for Our Digital Ancestors, and she will be joined by a trainee, to run sessions in schools, archives and churchyards in the dioceses, plus online training and webinars which people can attend from the comfort of their own homes.
