Every year, many graves disappear from our cemeteries in France. In order to give a second life to forgotten graves, the European collaborative genealogy site Geneanet renewed its “Save our graves” initiative.
On All Saints’ Day, many people come to gather at the burial sites where their deceased are buried, but there you have it. The disappearance of 200,000 graves per year from our cemeteries in France is felt by many to be a heavy loss, both for the heritage and for the memory of the person who disappeared.
initiative “Save Our Graves”supported for eight years by the Geneanet collaborative website, has made it possible to index the photos of more than 5 million forgotten or disappeared graves. Using an application, available on iOS and Android, Internet users photograph with their smartphone ancient tombs destroyed or deteriorated. This project brings together 26,000 volunteers who make these digitized documents accessible to Internet users throughout France, but also around the world.
” It is aimed at all denominations, Catholics, Jewish cemeteries – which are often quite old unlike Catholic cemeteries –, Muslim cemeteries. Finally, all places of memory, says Jérôme Galichon, innovation manager at Geneanet. It could simply be an urn in a colombarium that doesn’t necessarily have a grave. It makes it possible to keep them for eternity in digital version and sometimes it makes it possible to keep them for real, physically, because people will find the trace of someone who is of their family and maintain it behind. It is a project that is never finished. When we launched it, we really had no idea how many graves there were disappearing all over Europe, all over the world. These are absolutely colossal volumes. And so, it’s a project that brings its share of surprises and ultimately responds to a request. »
Duration of the funeral concession
If 200,000 graves per year disappear from French cemeteries, the problem is directly linked to the duration chosen by families for a funeral concession. When this period is 5 to 15 years, it is then said to be temporary. But it can also be 30 years or 50 years. The town halls accept more type of concession which is called perpetual for lack of space in the cemeteries.
The cost of occupying a space in cemeteries varies from one municipality to another. In Paris, for example, this fee is around 800 euros for a funeral concession of 2 m² for a period of 10 years and up to 16,000 euros for a perpetual concession of the same surface. Many families, for lack of means, mainly choose the thirty-year formula at 3,000 euros. And when the local communities note the total absence of maintenance of a burial, they order their destruction.
The collaborative work of Sauvons nos tombs allows genealogy enthusiasts to trace their ancestors. The data collected by Geneanet volunteers can also be consulted free of charge on its web platform. Internet users when they live outside France use them to find out where their ancestors who died in combat were buried by consulting photos of the graves of German and English soldiers.