20 Tips to Photograph Cemetery Headstones (The Right Way)

You definitely want to photograph cemetery headstones the right way once and not have to go back a second time. There is a method of taking pictures and documenting a cemetery, or a section of a cemetery, so that you will have all of the necessary information that you need when you get home to compile it and treasure it with loving, genealogical care.

When I say “the right way,” I am being somewhat subjective. I have visited numerous family cemeteries across different states and have photographed a slew of headstones on several genealogy research trips and while I don’t claim to be a photography guru, I do claim this article as being authoritative.

How To Photograph Cemetery Headstones The Right Way (20 Tips)

1. Photograph The Entire Cemetery Headstone

Yeah, well, obviously haha! However when I say this I mean take a clean photo(s) of the entire headstone face because later on you will be taking specific close-up shots. Try and get a shot which is level with and parallel to the face of the grave marker which does not distort the writing on the surface. You want to be able to read the names and transcribe that information accurately later on.

This may require you to crouch down or get into a lower position to get the best documented photo. I swear I’ve felt like I spent a day doing lunges photographing some family cemeteries, the thigh burn is real! Be sure to check the back of the headstone as sometimes there are inscriptions on the reverse side as well. I’ve seen this a few times so plan to check each one.

2. Photograph Sections of the Cemetery Headstone

Headstones come in many shapes and sizes. It’s always a good idea after you’ve taken a picture of the entire headstone to take several closeup pictures of any specific information that might need better resolution to read later on. For example, take photos of dates, or names, or inscriptions, or other details that are important for other researchers to know.

The devil is in the details and you don’t want to leave a cemetery only to realize that you can’t read a certain inscription or did not bother to capture that closeup image of a loved one’s inscription. I never realized just how much work and time is involved in visiting a family cemetery and attempting to photograph cemetery headstones, it can be tedious work for sure. It is also ALWAYS worth it!

3. Photograph the Surrounding Headstone Area

Snap a few photos of the area surrounding the headstone you are documenting. This is a good practice so that you don’t forget where grave markers are in relationship to one another. It may not feel important at the time but if you ever want to go back or are asked by another researcher about the headstone you’ve photographed, it’s definitely a prudent idea.

If your phone or camera has a wide angle option, now would be the time to use that. Take shots of surrounding headstones but also take a few photos of the graveyard itself including the surroundings such as structures, trees, rivers, or any other features that will make the picture more relatable to those viewing it.

I often think about bringing in my viewers to the spot where I’m taking the picture so that they can feel like they are actually there. This is also useful if you have several relatives, say a husband and wife, interred next to one another.

In Texas where I was photographing cemetery headstones for my 2x great-grandparents in Eastland County, I had no idea that they were buried next to each other as other documenters had only photographed them separately. I finally figured out the mystery and memorialized them together for all time.

4. Take Multiple Photos of Each

I can’t stress this enough. Take multiple photos of each headstone perspective, single, up close, and wide, as an insurance policy in case one of them is mysteriously out of focus.

I learned this the hard way in my amateur days. I paid for it as I flew over 3,000 miles to visit the resting place of one of my Texas ancestors and left with one or two grainy photos of the ones I really wanted! Well, I guess it’s a reason to go back!

HINT: The thing about digital photography is that photos are FREE. Unlike the days of film or cameras with limited GBs, photographing cemetery headstones is now a breeze with high-resolution smart phones. So snap up those photos and discard the ones you don’t like when you post-edit. You never know, you just might find a really cool photo that you never expected to take, I have.

5. Photograph the Cemetery Sign

Cemetery signs can be like photographing artwork. Some are more elaborate, some are Puritanly simple, but take the time to document the sign that bears the name of the cemetery you are visiting.

Do this even if the sign is in disrepair compared to prior photos that are online. I took many photos of my Alabama ancestors, including the sign which was in much worse shape than it was 5 years prior. If anything it documents the condition at a single time in its history as well as being a signal to others to have it repaired. My favorite cemetery sign is in Rising Star, Texas (picture below).

6. Photograph the Cemetery Grounds

I always take pictures to tell a story. Taking pictures of the grounds you are walking is a good way to tell the story of your visit to a particular cemetery. Even if you are only there to photograph cemetery headstones of your own family, take the time to snap a few of the roads, trees, structures, and anomalies you might notice to provide additional visual interest.

Personally, I find cemeteries very relaxing. They can be beautifully crafted landscapes designed to elicit feelings of respect and reverence. To that end, many cemetery grounds are manicured with golf course-like care to showcase their serene beauty. Capturing that in your pictures helps to engender that feeling for those who are viewing your photos but may not be able to actually visit in person. Pay it forward!

Each time I visit a family cemetery to photograph cemetery headstones, I normally just walk the cem grounds after I’ve finished to enjoy the scenery, be in quiet contemplation, and to read other family names that might be of interest. Oh deer, you never know what you might see!

7. Plan Enough Time While You Photograph Cemetery Headstones

I can’t stress enough how much work is involved in properly photographing headstones. For example, if you plan to photograph 3 headstones you could be looking at about 10 pictures for each and it might take you about 20 minutes.

That’s not including paying your respects and searching the grounds for others. Factor in trying to document an entire cemetery and you might be looking at an all-day adventure.

You also have to factor in drive times to the place you are visiting. While in Texas and Alabama, my drive times were up to 2 hours just to get to the cemetery – they’re all out in very small towns.

HINT: Plan NOT to rush. Going to a cemetery is like going to a museum or a water park, you don’t want to limit yourself to one hour when there are 10 hours of activities available! Again, photographing cemetery headstones can be tedious work and you never want to be burnt out before you finish what you set out to accomplish.

8. Don’t Disrespect Cemetery Graves

I was taught at a very early age not to walk directly over places where people are buried, but to walk around them. This leads to a somewhat unnatural feel when traversing a cemetery, often in right angles!

Disrespecting cemetery interments also includes a number of other things you might want to think about. Some of these may be cultural, others general practice.

Don’t litter, don’t disturb others around you, keep your pets leashed, and don’t park on the grass unless you’re in the country and know where you belong.

Cemetery Etiquette can be cultural too. English (British Isles) tradition includes leaving pennies on headstones or grave markers to pass our loved ones into the next life. My grandfather and grandmother are a case and point.

Never disturb or take these coins. Worse of all, make sure your kids don’t go and play with them by mistake. Another example of cultural etiquette is where I was taught never to point in a graveyard. Whatever your traditions are, just follow them.

9. Say A Quick Prayer Before You Photograph Cemetery Headstones

I usually say a quick prayer before going into a place where my ancestors, and others, are laid to rest. This is just part of my protocol but it helps me gather my thoughts before communing with my family. It also protects me from any negativity that might follow me out.

I always feel safe in cemeteries where my ancestors are laid to rest, but a bit uneasy in ones that I don’t. I feel like I “belong” there so have nothing to worry about, a bit the opposite in cems I don’t have a connection to. Superstitious? Maybe, but that’s how I roll.

10. Ask Permission If Necessary

In larger national cemeteries the hours of operation are your permission. In more rural locations you may need to contact someone if the cemetery is on private land. Each cemetery has their own rules.

In my experience, this is especially true in the South where the majority of my research has taken me. While many Southern cemeteries lie just off the road adjacent to the small towns they are attached to, some require you to pass over private land. Find out what permissions are necessary to visit small cemeteries.

This is good to do as a matter of course and can have very positive benefits. Contacting people associated with a small cemetery will often lead to stories or insights about a place that you never considered, you may even discover a few family history tales.

EXAMPLE: When visiting the small town of Rising Star, Texas on a road trip, my cousin contacted the local museum keepers about our impending visit to search for our ancestors there. They met us in person, and to our surprise had cleared all the weeds around the graves we mentioned we would be visiting. That’s one of my favorite stories and why I love country folk!

11. Research Your Cemetery Before Hand

Don’t leave a visitation to chance. Know everything there is to know about the cemetery you want to photograph and document BEFORE you get there. Find their website, ask local historical societies, or find someone on Find A Grave that may be able to help you strategize your visit.

If you can find maps or other references before hand, that will help you find the headstones you are looking for much easier. In Texas, we were given verbal directions that included: “take a right after the forked tree” which was honestly better than any map could describe and made us feel much more at home.

When visiting a small family Cemetery in Shelbyville, Tennessee, I was glad I looked up the cemetery in advance as there was another cemetery right nearby with a very similar name. That saved me a giant headache as I only had an hour to stop and document on my long drive up to Nashville. That brings us to number 12.

12. Research Surrounding Cemeteries

In the same vein as number 11, try and research surrounding cemeteries for family that might be there. This is especially true in rural America. Case and point, I drove up to Walker County, Alabama to visit my 4th great-grandparents in Townley, AL only to realize that I had other family also interred in local graveyards in Fayette County just up the road.

You don’t want to plan a family history research trip, travel hundreds of miles only to find out that you missed the opportunity to be able to photograph cemetery headstones a few miles away. This also factors into number 7 and allowing enough time in the day to accomplish what you set out to do.

13. Share Unique Attributes Cemetery Headstone Photographs

If you are planning to photograph cemetery headstones for other researchers, say for a Find A Grave request, then make sure you try and capture the minutiae of each memorial site you document.

While it’s nice to get the “standard” headstone picture, face-view with the entire inscription, it is also a nice gesture to include a few closeups of any unique features that a headstone or cemetery might have.

These may include foot stones, reverse inscriptions, top inscriptions, flowers, or any unique landscape features that make the grounds interesting. The service is to try and make the person for whom you are photographing feel like they are actually there.

After years of trying to find where in California my Tennessee 2nd great-grandparents ended up, I finally found their resting place thanks to a cousin who sent me an archived obituary. When I finally went to the cemetery to photograph their headstone, I realized to my dismay that there was no headstone! There was only a small, round marker in the ground about 2 inches in diameter. That’s all they could afford, but it’s a unique attribute indeed! I plan on buying them a proper headstone.

14. Time of Day or Season to Photograph Cemetery Headstones

You obviously want to be able to take great photographs when you set out to photograph cemetery headstones. Always take into consideration the time of day or season you are going to visit.

While it may not always be feasible to plan this out, any headstone photo will manifestly look clearer with the sun hitting the face and lettering, it just makes it all the more legible.

Taking pictures of headstone inscriptions in the shadow of the sun (the sun hitting the back of the marker) may result in inscriptions that are hard, if not impossible to transcribe. It all depends on the erosion level of the headstone, of course.

You may have to resort to a few techniques to bring old inscription back to life such as water, dusting, overlays, etc. Often times just tracing the letters with your fingers helps to decipher unreadable text!

15. Families and Landowners and Photographing Cemetery Headstones

Not all cemeteries you might want to document are on public land or land run by organizations that have clearly-defined policies. Through research you may encounter a situation where the land your ancestor is currently buried on, which was once was a ‘family’ cemetery on family land, has since been sold to another individual or family that no longer maintains an interest in its preservation.

What do you do then? Well, landowners are either willing or unwilling to grant you access to their lands. Landowners may or may not even know where previous family cemeteries existed. Landowners may or may not have cleared away prior interments to make way for structures such as barns, parking lots, planting fields, etc.

If the time period in which your ancestor lived is 4 or 5 generations ago, someone living on a piece of land might not even be aware of the existence of old family cemeteries that existed in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

In Halifax County, Virginia a few descendants of a 5th great-grandfather decided to research where there ancestor was laid to rest. I was among the Virginia cousins. Through research ahead of time, we determined that the generation of our 5th G-Grandfather (born way back in 1732) was laid to rest on private land.

We found the property and drove down there one summer to see if the landowner was amenable to us looking around. We had to drive past a “private property” sign about a mile down a private road and came up upon a house not knowing if we might get shot.

Fortunately for us the landowner’s son was really nice and offered to let us roam his land in search of our ancestors. He had an idea that there was a old cemetery on his land but had no clue of who they were, so after we told him our family history and connection to the area he let us attempt to find it, which, after about 30 minutes of 4-wheeling around his farm, we did!

It’s a fantastic story for any genealogist that persistence can pay off big time, and that there are still a lot of very nice people out there.

16. Small Town Southern Cemeteries

The thing I love about the Southern states I’ve visited and researched is that you often see cemeteries right off the road with their signs facing the passer-by. They’re like churches or schools in their prominence.

To me it’s so beautiful because it speaks to the value of family and small communities, it’s about the pride of place and the names of those places. Each small town has a cemetery named either after the town itself or a family that is representative of it.

In Texas as I was driving west from Fort Worth out to Brown County and Eastland County, each time you saw a small town off in the distance there was sure to be a cemetery off on the rise or along some quaint stretch of highway. Each one cleanly kept.

In Alabama, to my surprise after getting my rental car from the Birmingham Airport, there was a cemetery right outside of it just past the exit gate! It was just sitting there as natural as the air and sunshine.

As a family historian and a Crimson Tide fan I got the biggest kick out of the fact that there is a huge cemetery right across the street from Bryant-Denny stadium in Tuscaloosa!

17. Resetting Headstones A No-No

I’ve come across situations where headstones are falling due to weather and erosion. Never try and reset these headstones yourself, this is a no-no. You may think you are going to simply shift a headstone back into place, but you will only make it worse.

Resetting markers is not a part of photographing cemetery headstones. You can still get a good picture of an inscription, leave the repositioning of them to professionals. It would be your responsibility to then contact the right person or organization to rectify the situation.

18. Photograph Cemetery Headstones and Footstones!

Older graveyards, especially family cems on family lands, often used footstones to mark where the feet were, as opposed to a ‘headstone.’ If you see small granite blocks, usually about 6 inches wide or high on the opposite side of a headstone, that might be a footstone.

Do not mistake those for mini graves or separate markers. Footstones still exist today but are more common in older burials in my experience. Finding these can help you photograph cemetery headstones because they provide you with lines of demarcation of where one interment begins and the other ends.

19. Leaving Items of Respect

I was always taught to either bring something when you visit your loved ones laid to rest or leave something behind on their graves as a token of your love.

I believe this is all to do with your own upbringing; however it is nice to bring flowers, fruit, something you made, a flag, etc., to honor those of your family that you are documenting. If you are documenting an entire cemetery for Find A Grave then you can leave something small at the gate.

If you don’t have anything or you forgot to bring something then let nature provide for you. Find a tree or a flower that looks nice and is growing wild and make your own personal arrangement, it doesn’t have to be elaborate but represents a token of your connection to that person and the strength you draw from them.

20. Observe State Cemetery Laws

Finally, when you set out to photograph cemetery headstones make sure you follow all state cem laws in the process. While many of these laws are so-called “common sense,” there may be a few you may need to know. This may be especially true if you plan on doing mass documentation.

I’ve read Texas State laws regarding do’s and don’ts. It’s good to know these things because there are those out there who seek to disrespect our national and cultural heritage and the onus of the responsibility to stay vigilant in protecting our rights falls squarely on each and every one of us.

How do you photograph cemetery headstones? Which one on the list of 20 is your favorite?