What Is the Illinois Gravestone Photo Project?

The Illinois Gravestone Photo Project is a volunteer-run archive of digital photographs of gravestones in Illinois cemeteries. Its stated mission is to capture images of gravestones before weathering makes their inscriptions unreadable, and to make those images available to genealogy and history researchers. You can search the collection by name or location, browse by cemetery or surname, and submit your own photos. As of the site's last update (9/23/2026), it lists 105,145 approved photos and no pending submissions.

What the site offers

The project is organized around three main activities, each with its own entry point on the site:

• Search Gravestones — look for a gravestone by name or location.
• Submit a Photo — contribute your own images to the archive.
• Browse Cemeteries — explore the collection cemetery by cemetery.

There are also Surnames and Resources sections. Resources include "How Can I Volunteer?" and a frequently asked questions page.

Coverage and scale

The collection is unevenly distributed across Illinois. The site's own statistics list the top counties by approved photos:

These figures are measured by approved photos all-time. If the cemetery or county you need is not well represented, the site notes it is actively seeking volunteers to take and upload photos for many counties.

Who runs it and how it is funded

The project is volunteer-driven. The site describes volunteering as a "rewarding part-time activity" and points interested people to its FAQ and volunteer information articles. It also has a Donate link. The site states that all Gravestone Photo Project websites are independently managed, and that the Illinois project is hosted by ClickStart Web Services LLC. Copyright is listed as 2003–2026.

How to use it

1. Start with a search if you have a name or location. Use the Search Gravestones function to look up a gravestone by name or location.
2. Browse by cemetery if you know where the person was buried but not the exact listing, or if you want to see what exists for a given cemetery.
3. Check the surname index to see whether a family name appears in the collection.
4. Verify against the photo itself. The value of the archive is the image of the stone; treat the indexed name as a finding aid and read the inscription from the photo where legible.
5. Submit a photo if you have one that is not in the archive. The site provides a Submit a Photo path and asks contributors to help preserve history.

Practical limitations to keep in mind

• Coverage is not statewide or uniform. The top-county table shows heavy concentration in a few counties and much thinner representation elsewhere. A negative search result does not mean no gravestone exists — only that no photo is archived.
• The archive is photo-based, not a full burial index. The project's purpose is capturing digital images of gravestones and their inscriptions, not transcribing every cemetery's burial records.
• Volunteer capacity shapes growth. New photos depend on people willing to photograph and upload them, so counties with no active volunteer may stay empty for a long time.
• The site does not state a price or a login requirement for searching. Nothing in the available information supports assuming paid access or an account requirement, so check the site directly if access terms matter to you.

Where it fits in genealogy research

Use this project as an image source alongside, not instead of, cemetery records, death certificates, and other indexes. Its specific strength is preserving inscriptions that are fading: as the site puts it, "as decades pass, many stones are becoming harder, if not impossible, to read the inscriptions they originally bore." A photograph taken today may be the only readable record of a stone in another twenty years. If you photograph stones yourself, submitting them to the project is one way to make that record permanent and searchable for other researchers.