How my interest in the family tree started

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When my wife fell pregnant with our first child in 1996, I decided to start a family tree to hand down to the children when they were older. Like most of my "five minute jobs", this quickly progressed from a small project, into a huge task taking thousands of hours over the last fourteen years, and will probably take thousands more in the coming years.

As the family tree grew, I started adding burial information, including locations of burial (including section, row & grave number if I could find it), and some information from the headstones. To get this information I armed myself with a pencil, paper and the car keys and went driving. This manual methord soon became too cumbersome and slow, so I needed a quicker, more accurate and permament way to record the details I wanted. My trusty 35mm camera was dusted off and used to record the details for people who were "Definate matches" to people in the tree.

The early few photographs rapidly grew to many hundreds in a quick period of time. I also realised that I had missed the vast majority of people in any particular cemetery. I saw their graves, but did not have them in "the list", so never took their photograph. It was not till later I discovered that they died and were buried in that cemetery. I decided to purchase a digital camera for a number of reasons:

• Reduced cost of photographs. Images drop from about $0.80 for film to basically free with a Digital Camera.
• Ability to take more photographs during a trip, and sort through the "Probable Matches" at a later time. Instead of a trip being 2 or 3 24 exposure films, I might now take 500+ images in a single cemetery.
• Less time spent at each cemetery. Rather than writing down the "possible" matches, it was quicker to photograph them and move on to the next one.
• As I was planning on putting the family tree on the internet, I thought a grave photograph section would be a good addition.

Soon after the photographs were seen by family members I was inundated with requests for copies of the photographs. These requests urged me to get busy and visit more and more cemeteries throughout the state, and those few hundred photographs grew into a thousand and more fairly quickly, and all have been placed on this web page.

During the trips to cemeteries many odd things have happened.

• I have met relations tending their loved ones graves (Forbes)
• Chased by snakes (Parkes)
• My son Jacob got his first tooth while returning home from a trip to a cemetery (Woronora)
• Sinking in wet slushy ground to the middle of my shins! (Orange)
• Waiting for a funeral service to be over so I could take a photograph of that grave (Orange)
• I have even found myself getting lost looking for my car (Rookwood)
• Falling down a rather large, overgrown, drainage ditch, taking skin off in places I dare not mention here (Rookwood)
• I have been hit by cars (Woronora)
• Repetedly attacked by birds (Port Macquarie)
• I have even had staff call the police because I was taking photographs of their graves without permission (Waverley)

I have also spent many a day eating lunch in a distant graveyard with my family close by. I have even spent my 30th birthday in a cemetery at the Field reunion on 14th February 1998. My first Digital camera was retired after just over a year of service, and replaced with a new camera with more storage, and better battery life. After close to 2 years trusty service, that too was upgraded to a faster camera that could store well over 2000 photographs at 2 megapixel resolution. Since then a 4 megapixel, 10.2 megapixel and finally a 12 megapixel camera have slowly taken over the roles. Considering I have been known to take over 1000 photographs in a single trip, the storage and battery life was an important factor in the camera choice.

The last 2 cameras have used their own batteries, rather than AA or AAA's so I have 2 batteries used in a battery base, and 2 spare batteries, which gives me the ability to take about 3,000 images without needing to recharge the batteries. 16GB CF cards make a good match, with storage for over 2,100 full resolution images without the need to copy them to a laptop/PC.

The time spent searching for graves has been fun, and very much a learning experience for both myself and family. I have seen graves that are well over a hundred years old that look like they were erected yesterday, and some that are only a few years old that are badly weathered and damaged. From babies and children, to people over 100 years old, I have seen and photographed them all. Walking about cemeteries, using my own children to mark graves found by my wife until I get close enough to photograph them, this has been a team effort by my family, and it has given us an interesting, maybe unique, perspective on death, graves, and cemeteries in general.

To quote the grave of Queenie Clothier:
"Those we love never go away,
They walk beside us every day".