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This article is more than 19 years old
Why I love ...
This article is more than 19 years old
... findagrave.com
Nick Johnstone
Wed 14 Jul 2004 00.09 BST
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Most of us have made at least one pilgrimage to a famous person's grave. Maybe it was that teenage stoner voyage to visit Jim Morrison's grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Maybe it was that beard-stroking student trip to Highgate cemetery to share a sigh with Karl Marx.
For Jim Tipton, the King of Grave Detectives, tracking down the burial plots of the dead and famous has been a lifelong macabre hobby. In 1995 he set up www.findagrave.com, a database of his findings. Soon fellow "cemetery tourists" and "serious gravers" were emailing info. Today, Find a Grave is a full-time job for Tipton. With the help of six part-time staff, 100,000 contributors, "memorial sponsorship" and a hilarious online store (Map to the Stars' Bones $8; Find a Grave mug $11), these "Black Pages" now boast access to 5.6 million famous and non-famous grave records (the latter a gem for ancestry buffs).
You can search celebrity records by name, date, location or claim to fame. Thanks to Find a Grave, I've paid my respects to countless laid-to-rest heroines and heroes: Jean Seberg, John Cassavetes, Serge Gainsbourg, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote.
You name 'em, Tipton's got 'em. Search for Teena R Brandon (aka Brandon Teena of Boys Don't Cry fame) in the alphabetical Victims of Crime database (a gruesome sub-category of the Claim to Fame portal) and up comes a mug shot, mini-biography, burial plot details and a snap of her grave. Search Royalty and learn where Princess Ruxandra, the wife of Bogdan the One Eyed of Moldavia, was buried in 1518. Search Animals and discover that Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, has been taking a very long nap at the New Mexico Museum of Space History since 1983.
Alternatively, take a virtual stroll through Find a Grave's online cemetery. However you play it, it's a dead good site.
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