Capt. John Stanton and family

Elm Grove Stanton Graves plus text, a photo by midgefrazel on Flickr.

Tombstone Tuesday: Why Photography is Important

Elm Grove Cemetery in Mystic, New London, CT. 
Photograph by Fred Burdick

Overlaid text on a digital image can significantly improve the understanding of a family plot. These gravestones, moved from another cemetery some time ago, are important to the family of descendants of Thomas Stanton. Most descendants of the Thomas Stanton Society can lay claim to this line.

Some of the sandstone graves are completely unreadable and without a transcription or a photograph of how the grave once looked, it can only be a guess at what was once carved on them.

This is the classic example of why gravestone photography is important. By taking digital images of gravestone, the information will never be lost. That's our job to preserve history.