Stories from the archive
What headstones tell us: guides to reading old stones, data stories from our archive of graves and the history of the places they stand in.
All stories
13 posts · page 2 of 2
The Most Common Surnames on Gravestones, Country by Country
Novák, Nowak, Müller, Jones, Bondarenko, Kazlauskas: the surnames carved most often on the headstones in our archive, country by country, and what they mean.
8 min read
Cemeteries That Became Arboretums and Woodland
From Père Lachaise and Mount Auburn to Munich's Waldfriedhof and Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården: garden cemeteries, labelled trees, yew avenues and graves that became nature reserves.
8 min read
A Century and More: The Centenarians in Our Archive
1,679 graves in our archive belong to people who reached 100. We counted them by country and decade, and checked the oldest stones against their photos.
8 min read
When People Die: What the Dates on Gravestones Show
Nearly 600,000 death dates from European headstones show the winter peak, the influenza autumn of 1918, the last spring of the Second World War, and why COVID-19 barely shows.
7 min read