The project
A record that outlasts the people who keep it.
Jermory maps burial grounds plot by plot and records what is written on every memorial. The aim is simple: that a grave can be found on the ground rather than described from memory, and that the record survives when a custodian moves on or a piece of software is retired.
Why it exists
Burial grounds are losing their own records.
Most plot plans exist once, on paper, in a cupboard, a filing cabinet or a desk drawer. They were drawn by one person, corrected in pencil, and rarely copied. When the ground changes hands, or a volunteer of thirty years stops, what they knew usually goes with them.
The stones are the other copy, and they are wearing away. A soft inscription legible today can be unreadable within a generation. Once both the book and the stone are gone, there is nothing else to check against.
Jermory exists to capture that information while it can still be captured, and to keep it somewhere it will outlast any one custodian — on a map, in open formats, exportable in full at any time.
How a site gets recorded
Four stages, run by people who know the ground.
- Stage 1
Georeference
Satellite imagery of the site is aligned to survey control so positions are true on the ground, not approximate.
- Stage 2
Draw the plots
Volunteers trace plot boundaries and rows in the browser. No forced grid — burial grounds are not tidy.
- Stage 3
Record the people
Inscriptions transcribed, registers cross-checked, photographs attached. One plot can hold several people.
- Stage 4
Review and publish
A site admin approves each change set. Only then does it appear publicly, with its source and contributor shown.
The pilot
Jermory’s first full survey is under way at All Saints, Besthorpe, in Norfolk.
We are working through the churchyard with the people who look after it — georeferencing the ground, drawing every plot, transcribing the stones and photographing the memorials — and building the tools against a real site as we go. What we learn there shapes what every other ground gets.
Photograph of All Saints, Besthorpe — to come
Where things stand
Early, and built in the open.
Jermory is at an early stage. The tools are being built against the first site rather than in the abstract, and public search is not open yet. Bringing a site onto the record, and helping fund a survey, are both open to talk about now, and each feeds directly into what gets built next.
It is small. Jermory is built by a founder working closely with the pilot site rather than by a team, which is deliberate: a tool earns its place by being needed on real ground before it is generalised. That keeps the work honest and the roadmap short — the next thing built is whatever the current survey is waiting on.
- Georeferencing a site to survey control
- Drawing plots and rows in the browser
- Transcribing inscriptions with photographs attached
- Change-set review, with roles granted per site
- Full export of records, geometry and photographs
- Public search across sites
- Bulk onboarding for multi-site authorities
- Offline capture in the field
- A public API for other services
What a survey asks of you
A survey asks a site for three things. Time: a few dozen volunteer-hours for a village-sized ground, spread across a season. People: one or two volunteers who know the ground, plus anyone willing to spend an afternoon tracing plots or reading stones. Access: permission to walk the ground with a phone or tablet, and sight of any existing plan or burial register so the new record can be checked against the old one. None of it needs specialist equipment.