Hello. My name is Chris Kemp and I am a Taphophile.

Sounds like I am admitting to some dark secret. It is dark in a way but not really a secret. There are lots of others like me but we don’t tend to gather in groups although there are some out there who do.

What is a Taphophile then? A person interested in cemeteries, funerals and gravestones. From the ancient Greek ‘táphos’ - funeral rites, burial, wake, tomb, grave; and ‘phile’ – denoting a person who has a fondness of that thing.

I have always been interested in cemeteries and gravestones from an early age. When I was about 14 years old I bought two books about Grave Humour so I started early. My family tree reveals several undertakers as their professions so I reckon it is in the genes.

My main hobby is researching and compiling the family tree, and a lot of my family are in Overleigh Cemetery in Chester, England. Whilst photographing and transcribing family gravestones to put on findagrave.com I noticed that a lot of the gravestones were fading away or delaminating and the inscription would be lost forever. I decided at that point to try to photograph and transcribe the whole cemetery. There are more than 60,000 in there so it is going to be a long job.

It was whilst doing this I started researching the people on the gravestones and adding to their notes on findagrave.com - It has got to the point now where I have so many interesting stories about the people in this cemetery (and others I visit) that I need somewhere other than findagrave.com to share them with other people. A lot of the stories tell you a lot about the social history of a time and place and bring it to life.

It was then suggested that I needed a blog – so this is my first blog.

The stories I will write on here aren’t of the famous people – those have already been done to death (so to speak). The stories on here will be of ordinary people who had extraordinary life stories or extraordinary deaths.

There will also be entries about the weather, the wildlife, anything relating to graveyards, gravestones and death in general.