A special thank you to the dedicated and accurate genealogical researchers who honor both ancestry and families alike, transforming simple directories of names into living histories descendants can explore for generations to come.

And special thanks to the volunteers who go far beyond photography alone — sometimes probing the earth for buried stones, carefully resetting them, and restoring entire forgotten rows so families may once again find their loved ones. Such work is an extraordinary act of remembrance and respect.

It would be remarkable if one day a true Genealogical Proof Standard were embraced here.

● To family: Every document attached to our memorials has been preserved digitally and in hard copy to safeguard our family history in the event of server errors or other loss. If there is anything you would like removed, added, or changed, please let me know.

At times I'll display my husband's photo for his side of our family.

Photographs

Today, digital correction programs can restore and improve photographs from many sources, including original digital images, film, and older family photographs. Lighting, color, contrast, focus, and other imperfections can often be corrected. Many photo-printing services also offer professional color-correction analysis for a small fee, which can be helpful for everyday digital prints.

Genealogy websites now offer additional tools that can even colorize black-and-white photographs, using colors and descriptions supplied by the family. When used thoughtfully, the results can be remarkably natural and bring an old photograph to life in a new way. I have experimented with this myself and have included the original photograph alongside the colorized version for historical reference.

• A photograph is, by its very nature, a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world.

• When a camera photographs a person, it doesn't capture the person themselves. It captures light reflected from that person and records it onto film or a digital sensor as a flat image. Depth, movement, texture, and the way our eyes naturally perceive three-dimensional objects are all reduced to a two-dimensional representation.

• That means even the original, untouched photograph is not the same thing as reality. It is a record of reality as seen through a particular lens, at a particular exposure, from a particular position, and at a particular moment.