The objectives, and indeed the concept, of this site are to establish credible resources for graves data, and to crowd source people who may volunteer their services in both collecting and accurately transcribing grave data.
Most gravestones contain the useful basics:
- full names;
- year or date of birth;
- date of demise;
- and occasionally names of loved ones.
From this data, it is often possible, through very limited research, to establish a few additional factors, such as:
- places of birth;
- death notification numbers;
- cause of death;
- marital status;
- occupation;
- confirmation of where intended burial was;
- where resident at time of death etc.
This data may be obtained by either visitation of graveyards and transcribing the graves, or by photography, to be later transcribed. Zimbabwe's graveyards are spread far and wide and are numerous, contain many hundreds, if not thousands of graves. Thus this project needs a lot vounteers who are prepared to spend a little time, regularly transcribing and/or photographing. Collation of this data will be invaluable to the genealogist researcher.
The ultimate intention of this project is to:
- establish a credible and searchable heritage data base of Zimbabwean graveyards for all interested genealogy and other researchers to access;
- to contribute towards family history researchers in the establishment of family trees on a free, publicly accessible, collaborative family tree site, Wikitree; and
- to assist those researchng their family trees with assistance and direction to credible resources and encourage them to participate in the global family tree project.
