Genealogy Tip: Virtual Cemetery

Have you tried out the Virtual Cemetery feature in Family Tree Builder?

The Virtual Cemetery is a place to memorialize your ancestors. It is automatically created whenever an uploaded media file is associated to an individual’s burial fact.

Gravestones contain important information of relatives such as birth and death dates, names, spouses’ information and more. The Virtual Cemetery feature is a great way to enrich your family tree with a wealth of information such as gravestone images linked to family tree profiles.

The Virtual Cemetery compiles all burial-related media, making it easy to access information from these important sources, without crowding other photo albums in Family Tree Builder. It is kept separate from regular photo albums, as it is just associated with burial facts. This way, you will not see cemetery photos when looking at your images of living people.

Accessing the feature is easy. The Virtual Cemetery for all relatives can be listed together, or you can view by individual.

Using Family Tree Builder in Tree View, all people marked as deceased automatically have a gravestone icon displayed on their card. If there are already media files associated with the individual’s burial fact, then a small photo of the gravestone also appears on top of the icon:

Gravestone icon in person card (Click to zoom).

Hover over the gravestone icon to display the photo and related information such as death date and burial location.

Death date and burial information (Click to zoom).

To display the virtual cemetery of an individual, click the gravestone icon on a person’s card to access all media associated with the burial facts for this person. New gravestone pictures of an individual can be added directly by clicking New.

Adding Virtual Cemetery photos for an individual (Click to zoom).

To view the Virtual Cemetery for all relatives in a family tree click on Tools > Virtual Cemetery, or go to Photos, and under the View selector select Virtual Cemetery. You then have the option to choose a specific individual to view their information.

The Virtual Cemetery provides a one-stop-place to organize and access images related to ancestors’ burial information.

Have you tried the feature? Let us know what you think in the comments below.