In 2013 Chris Le Mottee embarked on a project to photograph graves in Jersey cemeteries and her photographs were posted to the Facebook Jersey Family Tree group. Although this has become a valuable resource, the pictures are grouped in albums relating to individual cemeteries, without any index.
Family pages
Chris has agreed that her photographs can be reproduced in Jerripedia, and we have added many of them to the family pages of those families whose members appear on the stones. We also have a page of images which are not linked to family pages and indexed sets of gravestones at each of the cemeteries covered so far.
Image quality
As might be expected with photographs of gravestones which can be more than 150 years old, the inscriptions are often very difficult to read, and in processing them for inclusion in Jerripedia we are doing our best to enhance their quality. Sometimes we can adjust the contrast of the image to make the lettering stand out better, sometimes we can highlight specific words, and sometimes we can undertake a very time-consuming process of digitally 'cleaning' the stone.
It should be noted that this is a collection of gravestone inscriptions, not images of the whole graves. By concentrating on the inscriptions only we can help provide valuable information for family historians. Where possible we also crop inscriptions to show only the most relevant family details and dates so that we can maximise the value of the image which inevitably has to be reduced in size to avoid overloading our server's storage capacity.
In some cases an inscription provides information about two or more generations of a single family; in others it unfortunately does no more than indicate that a specific family name features on the gravestone, confirming that further information could be available to any researcher able to locate individual graves in specific cemeteries. We regret that we are unable to handle any inquiries about whether more information is readable on the original digital images.
If you are having trouble reading any inscriptions you may want to change your screen resolution temporarily to zoom in on the lettering. How you accomplish this varies from device to device, but within most browsers on a standard Windows computer you use Ctrl and + one or more times to increase the magnification and Ctrl and - to return to the original setting. You can also click on a thumbnail image to see a larger version.
The images attached to each family page are captioned with information about the cemetery in which they can be found. At the moment the collection of images only covers about half the island's cemeteries, but work has already started to take photographs in further cemeteries.
Other families
Eventually our objective is to include an image of every gravestone in every Jersey cemetery, searchable by the names of those family members inscribed on the stones, but understandably this is likely to take some time. [1]
There are also a number of graveyards yet to be visited by Chris Le Mottee with her camera, but she has recently added St John, St Ouen, St Saviour and St Lawrence to the growing collection and intends to work towards creating a complete set.
War graves
A few victims of the World Wars are buried in Jersey cemeteries, but most were laid to rest overseas in cemeteries administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Our family pages contain a number of images of these gravestones
- Miscellaneous gravestone images
- Jersey cemeteries, a further general article on the island's cemeteries
- St Helier burial grounds, an old article from the Annual Bulletin of La Société Jersiaise
Notes and references
- ↑ 2022 update: No further gravestone images have been added to Facebook since 2016, so we have not been able to add to our collection. We are aware that a large number of further gravestone photographs have been taken for inclusion on the Find a Grave website, and we have a index for many of these in our Burial records section. Our problem with updating this index is that gravestone records on the site have to be opened one at a time and for those cemeteries already covered in Jerripedia it would be necessary to check whether we already include the image of each grave - a very time-consuming process to avoid duplication. We have, for some considerable time, been promised listings of graves added to Find a Grave since 2016 to facilitate the process of cross-referencing that site to Jerripedia, but this list has not been forthcoming. We are still determined to build on our gravestone image collection but it is not likely to climb to the top of our list of priorities before 2023 at the earliest
