Man helps others memorialize family, friends

By Deb Stone
The Portland Upside
April 2010

Photo by Robert Holcomb

Bill Myers has voluntarily taken over 13,000 photos of gravestones around Portland and made them available on the Web for others to see.

Imagine yourself in the picturesque city of Kalmar situated in southeast Sweden near the Baltic Sea. You are wondering why your grandfather left this industrial city in 1928, making his way to the United States. You wonder where his body was laid to rest. That’s where the Find A Grave website comes in.

Jim Tipton founded Find A Grave in 1995, creating the website as an offshoot of his own hobby of visiting the gravesites of famous individuals. The site became popular with genealogists when it expanded to house millions of records of non-famous individuals.

These records are created, edited and maintained by volunteer contributors. Consumers are not charged to search for family records or to make requests for photographs. Volunteers create memorials, update information, upload photographs and place virtual flowers on memorials for free.

Before the Internet age, researching genealogists spent hours writing letters to record repositories, visiting libraries to scan microfiche, or traveling to places where earlier generations made their lives. It was an expensive hobby. But the Internet greatly expanded information access and spread from urban to rural areas, creating communication byways across international lines. Sites grew into million dollar industries charging annual membership fees to access historical information.

In 2004, broadband Internet expanded to include almost all areas of Sweden. In early April 2009, Inger Sylén Johanson, of Kalmar, Sweden, had been looking for information about her grandfather, Jon Söderberg. She found an old letter where he was mentioned by name, and she was able to discern that he had served in WW I for the United States. He had returned to Sweden and had a son. Then he had immigrated to the U.S. for the remainder of his life. She posted a request on the Find A Grave website for a volunteer to locate and photograph his gravesite in Portland, Oregon.

“After a few days,” writes Johanson’s husband Chris, “an email arrived with the photo from the cemetery.”

The photo was taken by Bill Myers. Bill is one of 400,000 volunteers who provide free information and photographs in response to requests on Find A Grave. When a person like Inger posts a request, the website automatically sends an email to registered members within 25 miles of the requested gravesite. Those volunteers can choose to claim the request—that is, promise to visit and photograph the site within two weeks. If nobody claims the request, it remains posted on Find A Grave until someone chooses to fill it.

Bill has volunteered with Find A Grave since 2001, following the death of his first wife, Julee Jo Rea Myers, who passed away at age 45 from brain cancer. Bill wanted to memorialize her short life for their children and her extended family. While many funeral home websites offer a memorial page for family members to post the obituary and photograph of a loved one, the sites often require payment to maintain the online tribute. Bill joined Find A Grave and created a permanent, free, memorial page where family and friends can see her photographs, leave messages of condolence, and place virtual flowers at her site.

Each memorial provides space for birth and death records, names of children and parents, a biography, up to five photographs, and room for messages and virtual gifts. The person who creates the record owns the memorial and maintains control over the information on that page. In many cases, such as Julee’s page, a family member owns the record. But other memorials are created by strangers like Bill as a good deed paid forward.

Once Bill completed Julee’s memorial page, he realized there were probably many individuals who might like photographs of their family members’ final resting places. He was so moved by the history evoked at the Lake Oswego Pioneer Cemetery where Julee was buried that he decided to photograph all the headstones in the cemetery. He wanted to add them to Find A Grave. In order to post a photograph, he had to create a memorial page for each individual, entering the data from the headstone.

People searching Find A Grave on their own began contacting him to ask that a memorial he had created be transferred to them because the deceased person was a relative of theirs. Find A Grave permits the original creator of a memorial to transfer a page to another member for ongoing maintenance.

Bill also began receiving requests for photographs of cemetery plots in the Portland area from individuals living across the United States. He would stop at cemeteries on his way to and from work to fill those requests.

“Willamette National is so large and tons of requests come in,” Bill says. “So I hit that on the way home.”

River View Cemetery, on the hill overlooking the Sellwood Bridge, always has requests. He stops there often, too.

Bill is a U.S. Army veteran and he respects individuals who have served in the military. He decided to photograph all the headstones for Spanish American War veterans at River View Cemetery. He took two photographs of each headstone—about 600 photos in all—and created memorial sites on Find A Grave for each of the veterans. He then uploaded their headstone picture, even offering a CD of all the photographs to the cemetery itself.

Photographing headstones may not seem like an interesting hobby to some, but Bill’s background is in the color print industry where he started with letter press, learned paste-up and film stripping, then made the transition to digital media, learning to edit, clean, and tweak photos. He now operates Bill’s Photo Restoration and Archiving where he restores aged or damaged photos. Offering CDs of historical photographs seemed like a natural progression.

As a volunteer, Bill has added over 4,575 memorials to Find A Grave and uploaded over 13,000 photographs. He has claimed and filled over 412 photograph requests from family members around the world, including the one from Inger Johanson.

“I read her request,” says Bill, “so I shagged it down.”

He eventually located John Soderberg’s grave in Willamette National Cemetery. The photograph of his headstone reads: JOHN SODERBERG, PVT, US ARMY, Jun. 9, 1889 – Dec. 6, 1974.

”This photo means a lot to my wife,” wrote Chris Johanson. “It was the first time she had something tangible…to prove there was a person, a grandfather who had lived, even though far away from Sweden.”

Not all photograph requests are for family members. Bill has filled requests for those who wondered what happened to a buddy who served beside them in combat, and for individuals who wanted to list the final resting place for a classmate in the program of a class reunion.

“We are preparing for our 50th high school reunion,” wrote Nancy Phillips from Des Moines, Iowa, “and Marvin Harner was one of our classmates.”

Given the finite nature of human life, there is no end to the number of potential requests. As of March 2010, the Find A Grave site claims to host over 43 million records which may be accessed free at any time.

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Find out more about Find A Grave at findagrave.com Visit Bill Myer’s Photo Restoration & Archiving at billsphotorestore.com, or contact Bill at bill@billsphotorestore.com or 971-832-1465.

Deb Stone is a freelance writer from Beavercreek, Oregon, whose work has appeared in The Oregonian, The Portland Tribune, Asylum, Oregon Gourmet Foods, Poetic Voices, Kid-Bits and Willamette Writers.