A project dubbed " Google maps for graves" will snap every headstone in British churchyards so families can find the resting place of their distant relatives.
Surveyors for Atlantic Geomatics carrying state of the art laser scanners have started their mission to visit and snap every gravestone at the Church of England's 19,000 burial sites.
The images will eventually be hosted on an enormous free database being called "Google Maps for graves", The Times reports.
Using just the name of the family member, users will be able to pinpoint the exact grave and the epitaph written on the stone of their relative.
For a monthly fee, users can access detailed burial records held by the church.
The project is being funded by the National Lottery Hedge Fund, Historic England, and genealogy sites Family Search and My Heritage.
Parish vicars are welcoming the concept as they can't keep up with the flood of requests from people tracking down their British ancestors from across the globe.
Now that funding has been secured for a nationwide project, Atlantic Geomatics are getting started by digitising Cumbria's cemeteries.
One of the first will be St Oswald's Church in Grasmere, which contains the body of William Wordsworth.
Each scanner costs £100,000 and comes equipped with five cameras, two laser scanners and a GPS tracker.
In addition to the headstones, every memorial, building, wall and tree will be scanned - up to 50million tracked images in each churchyard.
Owner of Atlantic Geomatics Tim Viney told The Times each parish has given permission for the scanners to roam the graveyards, adding that staff get "asked all sorts of questions as we go round".
The survey takes four teams a few hours to record each inch of a site. They can get through up to three locations per day.
Archdeacon of West Cumberland, the Venerable Richard Pratt, said parishioners have been warned teams will be wandering through churchyards carrying high-tech gear.
He explained when he was a vicar at a church in Carlisle, one of the oldest in Britain, he "used to get loads of ancestry requests".
Pratt said he initially tried to answer all of them, but "soon discovered there was no end to it".
Andrew Rumsey, the Bishop of Ramsbury, who co-leads the oversight of church and cathedral buildings, said the project will "make a huge difference to those researching family history" and ease the "administrative burden on parishes".
“It will soon be possible to visit almost any Anglican burial ground in the country and see in real time the location of burial plots," he told the newspaper.
"For those researching at distance in the UK or overseas, the digital records will place detailed information from churchyards at their fingertips.”
Though the first graves, including Wordsworth's, will be digitised in the coming days, the massive project will take up to seven years to finish.
There are also plans to give families the chance to find ancestors buried in unmarked graves. They also plan to add data relating to rare flowers and shrubs that can be found in Anglican churchyards to the platform.
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