Understanding How Pictures Were Taken
Most stones contain information on only one side. During photography for this project if the text on the stone was clearly readable only one picture was taken. But not so long ago in Newfoundland, especially in St. John's, it was popular to have a plot large enough for several family members marked with a single four-sided stone to which many names could be added as individuals died. An example of this type of stone is shown at the right (photo ID NF068:STJ55-8826).
Information about the entire collection of names carved into a single stone is important in itself because it helps researchers piece together the families. To capture this information photographs of multi-faced stones were taken in such a way that a researcher would be able to recognize when one stone was finished and another started. When multiple photographs were taken of the same stone, the first photo taken in the series was normally a "full view" of the stone. Subsequent "detail photos" show individual faces or portions of the stone. It is important to understand that the name labels for the "detail photos" are the names that appear in those pictures. However, the name label assigned to the initial "full view" photo of the stone may or may not be the names visible in that "full view" photo. During the transcription process the transcribers first assigned a name label to each "detail photo" and at the same time attempted to identify the oldest married couple or most senior individuals associated with the entire group of people contained on all faces of the stone. Their names were used to identify the initial "full view" photo. One advantage achieved by this labeling technique is to increase the likelihood of there being at least one record in the database containing the names of both spouses, thus increasing the likelihood that researchers will locate the correct record. Each StonePics CD has a special index of names sorted in the order the photos were taken so researchers can readily identify which "detail photos" follow the initial "full view" photo in a series. |