Oh how I wish every cemetery had the trifecta of taphophiles Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis does!

The entrance of Lakewood Cemetery

Last year I spent several hours of nearly every weekend photographing headstones for Find A Grave at this beautifully landscaped 250 acre garden cemetery.

At the time the Find A Grave page for Lakewood said there were a little more than 155,000 memorials, 20% of which had been photographed. Today, as I draft this post the page lists 157,000+, 24% of which have been photographed.

The increase in memorials is a direct result of three things;

1. Lakewood is an active cemetery where new burials take place often.
2. A number of newly located un-memorialized graves are being added by photo volunteers.
3. Find A Grave volunteers continue to add memorials from the Lakewood database.

When I started adding my Lakewood headstone photos to Find A Grave, I quickly learned that there are several active F.A.G. contributors who regularly add memorials from the cemetery’s online database to the Find A Grave website. This was an enormous blessing for me as I had taken more than ten thousand pictures. The thought of creating memorials for each of them was a bit overwhelming.

This core of dedicated contributors even added section, plot and grave locations to their memorials. This is helpful in every cemetery but especially so in a cemetery this large where so many headstones bear common names.

A search for J. Anderson yields 242 results

In addition to adding as complete information as they are able to each memorial, they are also exceptionally responsive to edit requests.

And they verify the information presented to them! If a name or date on a headstone differs from the one on the Lakewood database, they want to know why. I love that! It makes Find A Grave a more valuable tool for family history researchers.

Because of this group effort, there will surely come a day when every person buried at Lakewood will have a memorial on Find A Grave. Every headstone in the cemetery will be photographed. And every Lakewood Cemetery memorial will reflect more about the deceased than just names and dates.

It’s great being able to help the team!