Gravestone Photo Project Policy

The Iowa Gravestone Photo Project by it's title should be pretty clear.
It is not called the "Iowa Burial Database Project".
The GPP mission is stated on the entry page to the site. It reads in part:

"The mission of this project is to capture digital images of the gravestones of our ancestors buried in Iowa."

I think if we began accepting entries without gravestone photos, we could be creating, unintentionally, an unreliable, misleading source of data. A photo of a gravestone is pretty reliable evidence a person is buried in a given cemetery. Almost any other statement to that effect, without supporting evidence, is hearsay.  Yet, I am confident that if we opened this up to not requiring a gravestone photo, we'd have people adding records for people that they just couldn't find assuming they must be buried there because other close relatives are there or for some other reason. Or there would be those who didn't have a photo of the deceased's gravestone but know that great aunt Millie is buried there and want to get her record in the database. For anyone who takes their administrative duties seriously, that would be a nightmare to administer.

There are better places to place info on those we feel we know are buried in a given cemetery but whose stone never existed or no longer exists. Such as on our county site under cemetery info, or on one of your Message Boards. Or in the case of GPP, they could add a post-em note to the record of another related individual if such a record exists.

Let's stick to the original mission of the project . . . Gravestone Photos.

Rich Lowe
Iowa Gravestone Photo Project Coordinator
http://iowagravestones.org