By Graham Brown

GENEALOGISTS FROM across the globe will soon be able to dig deep into the ancient burial records of Angus and search a virtual cemetery of the county.

In a six-figure investment, Angus Council will digitise hundreds of thousands of burial records dating back centuries and offer them to web travellers using the internet to develop their family tree.

The local authority has invested significantly in ancestral tourism in recent years, and officials hope the burgeoning market will help see the latest project pay its own way once up and running.

Angus is already involved in the Tayroots initiative which provides a vast range of information through its website for ancestral tourism surfers.

“The www.tayroots.com site will provide a great deal of rich content including images, video, audio and text not found elsewhere,” said Angus infrastructure services director Eric Lowson.

“A unique resource found nowhere else is the burial records of Angus, that can be used to locate ancestors, particularly those who died before 1885 i.e. prior to statutory death records.”

However the burial records are also important for locating ancestors in the post-1885 period because the statutory records rarely identify cemetery information/burial location.

“This unique information will attract great interest from visitors and locals alike interested in locating their deceased relatives,” added Mr Lowson.

“The concept is to scan all of the burial records (circa quarter of a million) and provide a searchable index of deceased people online, so that a particular record can be clicked on which would then bring up a digital cemetery map where “X marks the spot”—even if there is no headstone.

“A charge would be made to access the index of the records found with a further charge to download the relevant burial register image,” said the director.

Experts have already given the authority an indication the service could generate from £6000 to over £20,000 per annum.

It is hoped to have a pilot operating by the end of this year and the service fully operational by next spring.