In a letter to the editor of the Daily Press (Hampton Roads, VA), Graveyard history is worth preserving, Gordon White makes a strong argument for people in general, not just genealogists, to record cemetery data:
The work the Isle of Wight Gravesite Survey Task Force is doing to record inscriptions and other data from headstones and graves in the county is of immense importance, and should be duplicated by volunteers wherever there are unrecorded graves…Often grave and church records are the only remnants of the lives of our ancestors.
With the internet making dissemination of such genealogy data easy and fast, if every genealogist went out and found a cemetery or two that was not documented/recorded, we could knock out most of them within a few years. A lot of this has been done through RootsWeb and other similar sites, at the state and county levels, and a lot of work is being done in the UK and elsewhere.
If you know of a site that is trying to pull all of this information together, let us know and we’ll post the site.