Crowdsourced tombstone records make cemeteries function as genealogical archives

Evidence

Denise was also a treasure trove of information. She pointed me to a genealogical website called Find a Grave, which had just been bought by Ancestry.com two years before, in 2013. It was originally founded by Jim Tipton, who began it as a hobby in 1995 to record the cemetery information of celebrities. He understood that the information chiseled into tombstones—names, dates of birth and death, and often family relations—doubled as records of the people buried beneath them. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 517

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core theme of archival neglect versus reconstruction — Find a Grave as a counter-archive built by volunteers against the erasure Lanier documents.