On a frosty morning a 68-year-old man with a whirring backpack and an iPad is pacing up and down the rows of graves in St Michael’s Church in Barton, on the edge of the Lake District. He crunches forward a few steps on the icy grass — all the while looking at the screen — stops and turns up another row of headstones.
Tim Viney is not a Ghostbusters fan looking for supernatural stirrings, nor a goth. He’s a tech entrepreneur in search of the dead. His firm, Atlantic Geomatics, has started a seven-year mission to map all of England’s graveyards and create a database of the dead, with the goal of helping people fuelled by the craze for genealogy find the graves of their long-lost relatives.
Viney’s team has met celebrities including William Wordsworth in St Oswald’s churchyard, Grasmere, and Harold Wilson on the Scilly Isles. Among the 58,000 graves in Highgate cemetery, north London, were those of George Michael, Karl Marx and Alexander Litvinenko, buried in a lead-lined coffin to stop any possible radiation leakage. But it has also uncovered life stories that otherwise would not be told. In one churchyard the team found the graves of 30 children. “It was incredibly sad. It turned out they had all died within a few weeks of each other in a cholera outbreak,” says Viney’s colleague Sam Winder, 34.
Viney, originally from Berkshire, is a surveyor who spent more than 20 years working on maps of countries including Iraq and St Lucia. He worked for the government of Qatar in the late 1980s and early 1990s, establishing the first maps there to determine land ownership. He settled in Cumbria in 2002 and sees his latest project as providing “a vital public service”.
The National Burial Grounds Survey could also make him a lot of money: it has already had investment from the American genealogy companies MyHeritage and FamilySearch.
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The first results, produced in partnership with the Church of England and published on a purpose-built website, will go live in the middle of this year and will include all churchyards in the diocese of Carlisle, followed by Cornwall, Devon and Salisbury. “It’s been called the Google Maps of graves,” Viney says, “but it’s so much better than that — it’s three-dimensional data.”
The maps have neat rectangular plots you can click on, with a key showing whether it’s a headstone, a plaque or a tomb. Searching for a surname brings up the location of graves that match, with a photograph of the headstone plus additional information such as how deep the person is buried, their age and date of death and whether any family members are with them in the plot. The website will be free to use, with a tiered subscription service unlocking searches, as on apps such as Ancestry.
The 11 members of Viney’s team will eventually map 18,000 graveyards and about ten million graves, some of which date back to the Reformation. They will take about 35 million photographs of plaques, memorials and statues, and, when all the data is transcribed, Viney reckons there will be 250 million records. Luckily privacy issues will not get in their way: “There are no GDPR laws if you’re dead,” Viney points out.
The first stage of the process is the mapping, which is where Viney’s whirring backpack comes in. This box of tricks is a £140,000 Leica Pegasus — one of only four in the UK. It uses Lidar (light detection and ranging — a bit like sonar), taking 300,000 measurements a second. Five cameras create a 3D map of the surroundings, tagged with a high-precision GPS marker. Once a map is generated, digitised records are matched to each grave. If there is a record of a death but no physical marker of a grave, the person will be assigned to the parish.
Graveyards, Viney says, have been a bit of a dead zone when it comes to record-keeping. “The vast majority of local authorities’ private cemeteries and churches did not have an accurate, up-to-date map,” he tells me over a mug of tea in his firm’s one-room office on an industrial estate outside Penrith. Where maps of graves do exist, they’re more than 100 years old, and many are drawn on linen. The team found disintegrating paper records, untouched for decades in vaults; others had been destroyed in floods and fires over the years.
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Grave-surveying can be a solitary and occasionally “very eerie” job, Wilder says, but adds: “I’ve never had any ghosts . . . not yet, anyway.”
Once the project is complete, Viney would like to add baptism and marriage records — providing a complete cradle-to-grave database of every body in England. “Of course, as a business, we want to make a profit, but my personal goal would be to say we mapped the Church of England, rather than we’ve got a million quid in the bank,” Viney says. “I want to be proud of what we’ve achieved as a company — before I get to be in one of those things myself.”
