💰 The Spooky Quest to Build a Google Maps for Graveyards

TL;DR

A walk through the 167-year-old Carlisle Cemetery in the northwest of England took Tim Viney past the graves of World War soldiers, Victorian monuments, a narrow stream, and evergreen trees and shrubs.His company has now taken on the task of mapping every churchyard and municipal burial ground in England—a total of more than 18,000—to create a Google Street View of graveyards in which descendants, genealogists, and conservationists can click on a map and see who was buried there and when.The surveyor worked for more than 20 years in different parts of the world, from the Caribbean to the Middle East, before returning to Cumbria in England.Since then, the company has undertaken significant projects, including mapping Gibraltar on behalf of the British government, which took five years.Since November 2021, Atlantic Geomatics surveyors have been walking through graveyards, row by row, wearing a Leica Pegasus backpack that contains five 20-megapixel cameras, a GPS receiver, and two laser scanners that take 300,000 measurements a second."

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