Grave organizer

SANDY — John Warnke has been haunting graveyards for more than a year and is hooked.

"It's a morbid type of interest," he says. "Most people don't get excited about going to the graveyard. I'm just weird."

Since May last year, Warnke has devoted most of his leisure time — 30 hours a week, in addition to his full-time job at the Sandy Senior Center — to photographing graves from Spanish Fork to Idaho. In that time, he has shot 7,359 gravesites and entered them onto www.findagrave.com, a family history resource site created by Salt Lake City resident Jim Tipton.

Warnke's fascination with graves began with frustration over inaccuracies in family history information. He concedes, though, that he's always been a bit unusual in his tendency to organize and categorize.

"I've always been interested in record keeping and that kind of thing," he says. "Fifty years ago I was raising Columbia sheep. I would name the sheep and number them, and I could tell you which ones came from which mother."

"Now, 50 years later, I've turned from sheep to dead people," he adds, laughing.

But keeping track of thousands of images takes a bit more organization. For each picture, Warnke records the grave data and the number of the picture in a binder. He works through a cemetery systematically, dividing and subdividing it into sections to make sure he doesn't miss a grave.

"I'm a perfectionist," he says. "That's part of what got me into this."

And once the information is taken down and meticulously organized, each name, each date and any other information Warnke can dig up must be input onto the Web site manually, one keystroke at a time.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, Warnke was in Ashton, Idaho taking 1,100 pictures in a local graveyard. That took two days. Sorting through the data and transferring it to the Web site could keep him buried in his office for much longer.

Part of what keeps him at it, he says, is the realization that not everyone has the luxury of living close to their relatives' gravesites.

"I thought if someone in New York has a relative in the West or vice versa and they couldn't go to the gravesite, they could go to the Web site and see the information," he says.

It's a noble idea, he says. People usually warm up to it, even if they're initially spooked by what he's doing.