Came across this article at Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter about the Canadian city of Calgary has decided to replace cemetery headstones with GPS as grave markers instead. So, instead of looking for one’s beloved as inscribed in headstones, all one need is a hand-held GPS locator which will tell you the spot your loved on is buried in.

With the cemeteries getting full, this is a new strategy to deal with “overcrowding”.

Casting aside issues of environmental friendliness, would not colobariums be a more “dignified” way of dealing with overcrowding? While memories are not inscribed in stones and other material beings, surely having a marker of somewhat more permanence be a better option than a GPS tag?

Perhaps the need for permanence and visible markers are more for the living than the dead.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 9:52 and is filed under Genealogy, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.