Cemetery Files: From Headstone Photos to WikiTree Profiles

 Companion post to Episode 8 of A Country Girl Rambles, "Cemetery Files: From Headstone Photos to WikiTree Profiles." A new tool I've been building for cemetery work, plus news and events from around the tree. You can also watch the episode on YouTube, where I share my screen and show both tools.

Back in September, I walked through how I turn the headstone photos I took at Fairmont Cemetery into a WikiTree profile, one at a time. With thousands of photos still waiting, I kept thinking there had to be a faster way to get started. So, with Hacktoberfest and all the vibe coding craziness this month, I built one! The Headstone Photo Tool reads your headstone photos and turns them into a worklist for new WikiTree profiles, and it can even figure out which cemetery your photos were taken in, all by itself!

What it does

You import a set of headstone photos into the worklist, and the tool reads the text on each stone using OCR (optical character recognition). Open any photo, and you'll see the text it read and which reading engine it used. Some stones are easy to read, and some are a little harder because of the wear and tear on the headstone, but it fills in the information for you either way, and you can edit anything right there on the screen.

From there, it does a lot of the work I used to do in several different tools:

• Checks for existing profiles. It looks to see if the person might already be on WikiTree, and there are buttons to check WikiTree and to search WikiTree, Find a Grave, and FamilySearch. (A button to add the person is next on my list!)
• Reads the GPS. From the GPS coordinates saved in the photo, it preloads the date and time the photo was taken, and finds the cemetery.
• Builds the citation. Put your photographer name and WikiTree ID in the settings once, and it creates the monumental inscription citation for you, with what the headstone says, the GPS coordinates, the date the photo was taken, and who took it.
• Finds the Space page and category. If the cemetery has a WikiTree Space page and category, it adds those too.
• Tracks your progress. Once you've created the profile, add its WikiTree ID, along with the Find a Grave and FamilySearch IDs, and set the status.
• Exports a CSV for a Cemetery Plot Map, one photo at a time or the whole group at once.

The cemetery lookup takes the middle point of all your photos' GPS positions, looks up the cemetery on OpenStreetMap, and fills in the town, county, state, and country. I tried it on my own photos from Fairmont, and it worked! It found the cemetery, Colfax County, and the existing Fairmont Cemetery, Raton, NM, USA Space page and category. Nothing to type!

A few honest limits

• If a cemetery isn't mapped on OpenStreetMap yet, the tool still fills in the town and county, but you'll need to type the cemetery name.
• If your photos are spread far apart, it warns you that they may not all be from the same cemetery.
• Only the GPS position is sent to look up the cemetery, nothing else from your photos.
• It's still a test version (0.1.0), so I'd love to hear what goes wrong! (I haven't tried it on a big album from another state yet.)

Many thanks to the OpenStreetMap contributors for all those cemetery outlines!

You can try the test version here: Headstone Photo Tool. I'll be putting up a Space page and a G2G post for it soon, so you'll have a place to share your feedback.

How it works with Cemetery Map

The Headstone Photo Tool feeds right into its companion tool, Cemetery Map. Cemetery Map takes those headstone photos and shows them on a map, using the information from the cemetery's Space page. Click on any dot, and it shows you that photo and its information. Its opening view now shows the ready-made cemetery maps as dots too, with a count of rows for each one.

Fairmont is so big that I have a separate album page for each of its eight sections, so each section gets its own map.

Will you help me test it?

If you have a folder of headstone photos sitting on your computer (and I know some of you do!), I'd love for you to give both tools a try and tell me:

• Did it find your cemetery?
• Was the WikiTree Space page right?
• What would make the worklist more useful to you?

And if you'd like to help me with Fairmont itself, the free-space page has the section-by-section status. Or, check out a cemetery near you through the Cemeterist Project!

Thanks for your feedback on Name Cloud

Name Cloud has had such a wonderful response! I've gotten a lot of great feedback on last week's G2G post and on Discord, and your ideas are already shaping what comes next: handling double surnames and prefixes, a banner option that keeps the middle clear of WikiTree's header, more fonts and colors, and just one side of the family. You also found a real bug: a French-Canadian name like "Liard dit Brunelle" was being counted as three names, with "dit" showing up as a surname. I'm working on those enhancements and bug fixes now, and I'll have a new version out for you soon. Thank you so much to everyone who tested!

My WT Apps by Azure page is the access point for all the tools I've been working on, with links to the G2G posts for each one, so you can give feedback there too.

News from around WikiTree

This week's WikiTree newsletter has a Hacktoberfest roundup, and I was so excited to see my vibe-coded apps, including Recipe Roots, featured in it! If you've been curious about trying vibe coding yourself, or you have ideas at 3am like I do, I posted on G2G offering to mentor or just give some feedback and help. Three to five of you have already reached out, and we're talking through some of those ideas now. It's so exciting to see what everybody's coming up with!

Registration is open for WikiTree Challenge #11 with Gideon Greenspan, running 12 to 19 November. His CC7 is starting out at just 13, with roots in Belarus, Croatia, England, Israel, Poland, and Scotland, so there's lots of room to grow!

The Events Committee is also looking for volunteers for the year! If you'd like to help us plan events, or help with some of the admin work events need, please respond to the post on G2G.

And of course, one of the big events of the year is coming up: WikiTree Day! WikiTree turns 18 on 5 November, and registration is now open. It's open to everybody, so even if you've never been on WikiTree, you're welcome to join us, celebrate, and maybe learn a little bit about it. There will be prize draws, project activities, livecasts, and Zoom sessions throughout the weekend. Speed cousining was our big hit last year, so we're doing that again! And keep an eye out on WikiTree Day, when I'll be launching a brand-new monthly challenge.

Upcoming events & challenges

Today, 22 October: The Hacktoberfest livecast at 1pm ET, chatting about the last week of Hacktoberfest on WikiTree, and the US Black Heritage Project's monthly Zoom session.

Friday, 23 October: Friday Date Night at 4pm ET.

Saturday, 24 October: Saturday Roundup at 10am ET (or Saturday evening or Sunday, depending on where you are in the world!), and the Genealogy Collaboration Hour at 5pm ET.

Sunday, 25 October: Member Q&A at 11am ET. These are great sessions with very knowledgeable hosts who can answer your questions live while sharing their screen.

Monday, 26 October: Hacktoberfest "Hack Out and Hang Out" Zoom session with Greg at 6pm ET.

Wednesday, 28 October: German Stammtisch at 2pm ET.

And don't forget the Weekend Chat on G2G every weekend! For everything else coming up, check out Help:Calendar.

Do you have headstone photos waiting to become profiles? WikiTree is a great place to collaborate, and I'd love to hear how the tools work for you!

Hope to see you around the branches!

Check out all I'm working on here: WT Apps by Azure