Yesterday, I provided information about the Victoria, Australia, Cemetery Records and Headstone Transcriptions, 1844-1997 collection at Ancestry. This morning, I was wondering if headstone photographs for these cemeteries were available online, and if there were, would I need the collection at ancestry?
I decided to test this by looking for a headstone photograph for the person I looked at yesterday, Henry Hooton, who was buried at St Kilda Cemetery. I found a headstone photograph for Henry, his wife Emma and son Herbert on FindAGrave –
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=102480044&PIpi=72816541
After looking at the photograph, I was grateful for the transcription. I could make out some of the details, but much of it was indecipherable.
Not all of the headstones at St Kilda Cemetery have been photographed, so I decided to see if there were any photographs available for some of the other people in my tree. The first person I tried was William Thomas Allen, who died in 1893. Although FindAGrave has a memorial, there is no headstone photograph. The collection at ancestry did have a transcription of his headstone. There was no headstone photograph at BillionGraves.
When I did a search for others in my tree who had been buried at St Kilda Cemetery, I found many of them didn’t have a memorial at FindAGrave. For these, I also found there was no headstone transcription at Ancestry either.
The advantage of using BillionGraves or FindAGrave is that these are free, while Ancestry is a subscription site, so I would search these first, and then refer to the collection at Ancestry if there is a memorial, but no headstone photograph, or the details on the photograph are hard to decipher.
Lois Willis - Genealogy and Family History 