Belarus Historic Cemetery Indexing

The cemeteries throughout Belarus are the true history of the people from around the Country that have provided the roots for those of us, like the family of my Great Grandparents Louis and Anna LaPidus, that moved onward and outward to places around the world. I have spent 25 years since 1993 searching for my Father's family and finally found the location of the Zaslavl cemetery where they should have been buried with the help of the group that I want to support. But since the local and country governments have not taken good care of these locations, the cemeteries and their headstones around Belarus have been allowed to deteriorate. I am working with a group that has created a web site, graves.by, that investigates and photographs the gravestones found in historic cemeteries, both Jewish and Christian, and posts their findings on their web page to allow genealogists and people like myself who have Belarusian family ties to search for their family roots.

Graves.by allows us to find out where we came from and to trace those locations to further allow us to potentially take care of our family history by taking care of our historic gravestones. I would like to help graves.by to raise money to travel across Belarus in order to visit these historic cemeteries in order to photograph all of the gravestones in each location they can reach and to post them on their web site which is free to access.  Within this project stage, money is raise to clean the graveyards, carefully clean the tombstones, and map them on graves.by tagging their location with a tailored application. With the geotagging application finished within this month,  we are hoping to expand the project through Belarus by providing local communities a tool that will allow them to join the effort.

This project has helped me identify the Zaslavl Historic Jewish Cemetery in 2016 and to take photos of 12 of the gravestones that my son and I were able to dig up from being buried and to have them translated and to post them for people to spread the word about. Ideally, I plan to place a memorial at this cemetery to reflect its place in history.  The two people in charge of the money will be Andrei Burdenkov and myself. I thank you in advance for your support.