CemeteryBase

Type of activity Initiative

Location Russia, Dmitrov

The CemeteryBase initiative commenced its work in 2017 in the suburbs of Moscow. In Russia, there are no official open cemetery databases, which complicates the search for burials of relatives considerably for all those involved in genealogy and family history. The existing burial databases are made and maintained by volunteers. The CemeteryBase team is set to contribute to the development of necropolism in Russia.

Over the three years of the project’s existence, volunteers created open databases on five cemeteries located near Moscow. Project participants take pictures of the graves, and then enter the information from the images into an online database. In its work, CemeteryBase gives priority to old, non-functioning cemeteries, since the monuments are often in worse condition there, and adding them to the database is the last chance to preserve the memory of the buried there for posterity.