The DIS is the largest association of genealogists in Norway and their website is constantly improving their services with better search functions. Now it is possible to look through nearly 180,000 images of gravestones, newspaper Vårt Land reports.
"You can search at the national, county or municipal leve. The base is far from complete, but just yesterday we got four new churchyards," project leader Renathe-Johanne Wågenes told Vårt Land.
Last week Haugesund Church launched its grave pages on the Internet and other areas are doing the same, Molde and Karmøy among them.
"We get many phone calls from genealogists, especially from the USA, who wonder where their relatives are buried, churchwarden Petter Losnegård told NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting).
The registration effort in Haugesund has been going on for over ten years.
"The next step will be to publish a map showing where the graves are," Losnegård said.
Wågenes said that DIS is cooperating with several churchwardens to get access to their databases. Besides verifying the information in church databases, the DIS registers the records in detail. A search on an entry in The Norwegian Church in Haugesund brings up birth and death dates, graveyard and gravenumber.
"We also have the title and memorial text. Together with a picture of each headstone, this is the ideal," Wågenes said.
DIS information is compiled by volunteers, many of who make a trip to graveyards with their digital cameras when they are traveling on holiday. The DIS plans to have maps and charts showing the exact location of graves in their database, but the task is immense.
"I don't know how many graves there are in Norway but there must be well over a million. But it isn't so long since the base had just a few thousand gravestones, and soon we will have 180,000," Wågenes said.
The registration of tombstones has the permission of both the Ministry of Church Affairs and the Data Inspectorate. Norway's personal information laws only apply to the living, or if information can be linked to living person. The Inspectorate does not consider the protection laws to pertain to details of death and burial.
