Aoraki Polytechnic student Zara King photographs a
gravestone at the Southern Cemetery yesterday as Alex
Crackett looks on. Photo by Craig Baxter.
Stewart Harvey likes a challenge, but, even by his
standards, his latest project is a major undertaking.
Mr Harvey and a team of volunteers plan to photograph every
grave, headstone and plaque in Dunedin's Southern Cemetery.
Exactly how many photographs that will entail, Mr Harvey, of
the Historic Cemeteries Conservation Trust, is not quite
sure.
But with 4000 graves, most of which have headstones and
plaques, and up to five or six photographs required per
grave, the task was expected to take at least six months to
complete, he said.
The cemetery, Dunedin's second, was opened in 1857 and is the
resting place of many of the city's earliest settlers.
The images would be carefully matched to cemetery plot
records and uploaded to the Dunedin City Council website,
where they could be viewed through the "cemeteries search"
link, Mr Harvey said.
"It is an ambitious project, but it will become a wonderful
resource for genealogists all around the world," he said.
Preparation for the project began several weeks ago, with a
Task Force Green worker employed to wash the headstones and
plaques.
The photographers, including a group of students from Aoraki
Polytechnic, began their work yesterday.
The project was a first for Dunedin but had been done in
other places in New Zealand and overseas, Mr Harvey said.
However, unlike the images available on some other databases,
he said he was determined the Dunedin images would be top
quality.
"If a headstone is on a database, you need to be able to read
the information on it clearly, and be able to zoom in for
greater detail."
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