Public burial records for a community's cemeteries
A public website where families and researchers search the burial records of several Jewish cemeteries, with a staff area for the records and grave services.
- ~85details per burial record
- 2calendars, civil and Hebrew
The client
The representative body of a city's Orthodox synagogues, which looks after the burial records of several Jewish cemeteries.
The challenge
Burial records for several cemeteries were kept in separate Access databases, each in its own format, with dates typed however the person entering them saw fit. Families tracing relatives, and genealogists researching them, had no single place to look.
One set of records
In 2008 we brought every cemetery's records into one standard format, in one database behind a public website. The import read dates written in several different ways, ages given as "about" or "approx", Hebrew dates and notes about tombstones, so nothing was lost along the way.
What families see
- A search by surname, with cemetery, first name and year of death to narrow it down
- A full record for each burial: names in English and Hebrew, parents and family, dates, the grave's location, the tombstone and the funeral
- Dates in both the civil and the Hebrew calendar, including the leap-year months, and dates known only roughly
- Accounts with a history of past searches
What the staff use
- An advanced search across around 85 details per record
- Adding and editing records, with a printable record page
- Services families order for a grave, tracked from enquiry and estimate through to completion, invoicing and the renewal date
Changing with the charity
The site started as pay-per-view, with credits bought online. In 2023 the charity decided the records should be freely available, so every account now gets a monthly allowance of free views, topped up automatically.
Technical details
ASP.NET Web Forms in VB.NET on .NET Framework 4.8, with LINQ to SQL and SQL Server. Civil and Hebrew dates are stored as minimum and maximum pairs so partial and approximate dates search correctly. A one-off migration of around 1,000 lines merged six cemeteries' separate Access databases into SQL Server, parsing free-text dates and ages. Credits were sold through PayPal with instant payment notification, and a scheduled job now tops up free allowances.
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