| Founder(s) | Jim McKane |
|---|---|
| Founded | July 1, 2009 |
| Location | Wiarton, Ontario, Canada |
| Mission | to archive headstone photos and the inscriptions on them |
| Method | a non-profit Canadian corporation |
Canadian Headstones is a project to capture digital images and the complete transcription of cemetery stones. It is a web-based Canadian Non-Profit Corporation which is run completely by volunteers.
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Jim McKane began his genealogical quest in the early 1970s when his father convinced him to become the keeper of the pedigree for his Lyons Clan Reunion in Chinguacousy Township, Peel County, Ontario. In April 2009, while volunteering as assistant webmaster of a website, he found a website archiving headstones for those who were born in County Tyrone, Ireland, the home of his ancestors.
Realizing the value of the information to genealogists and family historians, he set out to research the possibility of creating an archive for Canadian headstones. While there were a number of websites storing photos of gravestones, none also included the inscriptions on the gravestones. The majority of existing sites also had either no search engine feature or very poorly constructed search features. The result was the creation on 1st July 2009 of CanadianHeadstones.com
The bylaws of Canadian Headstones state that the purpose of the corporation is: the corporation shall gather, archive, publish and disseminate genealogical, historical data or other records of interest to family historians, genealogists or other researchers.[1]
Canadian Headstones relies on volunteers to upload photos. The site steps a contributor through uploading a photo, editing it, choosing a county and cemetery, entering the names and inscription.[2] It is then checked by a Coordinator who assists the contributor to fix any problems.
In the first 2 years CanadianHeadstones.com had 220,000 records submitted to the site.