A few weeks ago I was contacted by the sister of someone whose memorial is on one of my webpages. The memorial is on Patch Barracks, not accessable to the general public. She called to thank me for the pictures and tell me how happy the family had been to find them online. She had been at the dedication of the memorial in the late 1990s, but had not been able to return to the site.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone in Norway looking for the buriel site of someone from their family who had died at the concentration camp cemetery in Vaihingen/Enz (image). I am trying to get in touch with an institution that can help.

On the one hand I am quite happy about these contacts. It is encouraging to see how my site can be relevant to people's lives. On the other hand, such contacts will inevitably remain intermittant. I am not systematically collecting the names of the dead memorialized at the sites I visit, so searches for names will rarely lead to my site. When people do show up looking for help, I cannot promise to go back to sites on the webpage and look for particular gravesites. I will help where I can, especially on nearby sites, but to do so systematically or thoroughly or routinely would open up a whole new dimension to my work and serve a totally different intent from what I set out to do.

Organizations like the Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge or webpages such as Michael Southwell-Keely's collection of war memorials in Australia serve the purpose of recording the biographically-relevant details of memorial culture and perpetuating it online much better than I can. There, all the information is collected and people can systematically search for information about their family members.