How can a “green” burial help to find a grave?
Everybody loves a genealogy challenge, but when Nampa, Idaho city employees started spending the greater part of their days locating gravesites for call-in family historians, city officials knew something had to be done. Rather than turn away long-distance calls for help, city officials decided on something better—a way to make graves and gravesites accessible to anyone, anywhere, thanks to digital photographs, GPS technology, and a searchable database on the Internet. Now family historians with kin buried in Nampa can search by first name, middle name, last name, birth date, death date, interment date, or the section, lot, or space on which the gravestone is located. Each search result includes a photograph of the gravestone, an aerial view of the gravestone that pinpoints its location in the cemetery, and a map of the cemetery. “If there was something on the back of the headstone, those pictures were also included. It’s almost like a family group sheet so we tried to be as thorough a
Green Burial: What You Need to Know What is a “green” or “natural” burial? Green burial seeks to return one’s remains to the earth, as directly and simply as possible. It thus avoids embalming (and its toxic chemicals), metal caskets and burial vaults that are standard features of the modern funeral. In their place green burials favor interring the deceased in either cloth shrouds or in simple coffins made from cardboard or plentiful softwoods, like pine. Bodies are then laid into vault-free graves, often in woodland settings available in the “natural cemeteries” now springing up in this country or on one’s private, rural lands. Headstones, if used at all, are typically fashioned from native fieldstones and set flush to the ground, though shrubs and trees may be used instead. Such natural return is little more than a return to long tradition. Much of what constitutes green burial was once standard practice in this country, the default, not the exception. The goal then and now is the sa
A global positioning system locator is placed in the green burial caskets to help find the grave in the future. The cost of a green burial can be as low as $2,000. The average cost of a traditional funeral and burial is $10,000 to $12,000, Benage said. A casket and a vault alone cost about $4,000.
