Histopolis Grave Index - Benefits

The Histopolis Grave Index extends the capability of our cemetery-level links to support situations where the cemetery is not known, there are many sites with links, or sites not organized by cemetery.

Cemetery-Specific Links

Histopolis has provided place-specific links to sites with genealogy and history content about cemeteries and other places for more than a year. These place-specific links are very effective when:

You have already identified the cemetery,
There are links to a small number of sites, and
The sites are organzied by cemetery

Given the above situation, it may be reasonable for a researcher to visit each of the linked-to sites searching for the desired grave information. If you don't know the cemetery, however, it might be impractical to repeat the above process for each cemetery in a county or state. Similarly, if there are links to dozens or hundreds of sites the search can become impractical using only the existing cemetery-specific links.

Sites Not Organized By Cemetery

There are a large number of personal (or family) genealogy sites that are not organized by cemetery. Each page typically contains rich information about a single individual or family group that may include the burial cemetery. While these sites contain much useful information, their content can be difficult to discover using traditional tools such as search engines. Since the sites are not organized by cemetery, adding cemetery-specific links to Histopolis for these sites would typically require many links to the site for each cemetery.

Histopolis Grave Index

The Histopolis Grave Index implements grave-specific links that are very effective no matter how the site is organized.

Benefits for Researchers

The Histopolis Grave Index makes it easier for researchers to easily locate grave information:

even when the cemetery is not known (coming soon),
even when there are links to many source sites for a specific cemetery, and
even when the information is located on a site not organized by cemetery.

Use of the grave index is free, contributing to the grave index requires the creation of a free user account.

Benefits for Website Owners

The Histopolis Grave Index benefits website owners by

providing a new means for researchers to discover your content,
bringing visitors to your site, and
under some circumstances, benefitting your ranking with search engines, such as Google.

While the Histopolis Grave Index benefits websites of all sizes, it provides smaller sites, such as personal genealogy sites, the means to expose their burial information to a broad audience. There is NO cost or obligation to have your website participate in the grave index.

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