Benjamin Cline has written an article, Census of the dead still alive in the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), about local genealogists efforts to catalogue the various cemeteries, and get the information into databases and out to genealogists outside of the area.
Excerpt from the article:
Members of local genealogy groups are reaching out for improved contact with this area’s dead, in a thoroughly modern way. They are compiling the digital deceased.
“I can take 200 pictures of grave markers in an hour, put them onto my computer and type the information into my database,” said Sandra Gustin of Englewood. “The camera can zoom into many areas of a stone. It brings out everything.”
Gustin is a leader of the project of the Montgomery County chapter, Ohio Genealogy Society, to copy and publish a record of the tombstone inscriptions from every cemetery.
With good digital cameras being so cheap these days, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be going on all over the place – when you are involved with a local genealogy group, you can even split the workload – one person go out and take the pictures, another edit them, and even another take the information and put it into some kind of searchable database (or even a text file on a website, where the search engines can find it).