A woman has opened up about her unusual hobby and revealed she wants to take photos of all the graves in her county.
48-year-old Lou Cocker is a history enthusiast from the UK who is not afraid to visit cemeteries. In fact, she goes there regularly to take photos of random graves.
As the lady from North Walsham revealed, she hopes to take photos of all the graves in the county of Norfolk. So far, she has already paid a visit to several hundred cemeteries and took photos of over 220,000 graves.
While her hobby may sound weird, Cocker is doing it all with good intentions.
According to the 48-year-old, she keeps the massive grave photos collection so that history – and people long gone – will not be forgotten.
After taking photos of headstones, the woman carefully documents her findings before sending the information to Findmypast, a website for those who are looking to learn more about their family’s past and those looking to find long-lost relatives.
“I just think that this is really important to do for future generations, so that they might be able to trace their family back,” Lou said according to The Mirror.
“It’s becoming so popular now for people to want to know where they came from – hopefully this will help. I have had people contact me through Ancestry.com about some of the photographs I’ve taken.
“But because I’ve got so many photographs, I haven’t really had a chance to put names to all of them yet.
“In some of the places I’ve been to, there are thousands and thousands of gravestones in just one cemetery or churchyard.
“I don’t think it’s something I will ever be able to actually complete, because sadly people die every day.”
As the history lover added, her “weird” hobby started more than a decade ago, and she believes she still has a long way to go before her collection is complete.
Nowadays, she not only pays visits to various cemeteries but also cleans up older graves to ‘revive’ the inscriptions.
“I was never really into history when I was at school, but when I started trying to trace my own family tree, and track down their gravestones, I just found it absolutely fascinating,” Lou says.
She also expressed feeling saddened by the fact that some graves have already been completely overgrown by grass and essentially forgotten.
“But if I come across something like that and it’s still accessible, I will do my best to clean it up and photograph it. You’d be surprised what a bit of water can do for some of these stones,” she added.
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