The open record
The record, in the open
This is a record about real people, so it should outlast any one website or person. The whole burial record is published here as plain, citable data: a snapshot anyone can read, check, archive, or build on. Names and dates belong to no one; the care taken with them belongs to everyone.
Download
- hingham-lives.csv the whole record, one row per person
- hingham-lives.json the same, structured
- DATA-DICTIONARY.md what every column means, and how sure we are
- LICENSE.txt Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
How to use it honestly
Every fact carries a confidence, and an empty value means the record is silent, which is an honest answer, not a gap to fill. Find a Grave is treated as a lead; the 1893 History of Hingham, the gravestone, and town and military records are the standard. Same-named people are never merged on a guess. If you find an error or hold a source we do not, that is the work, not an interruption.
Made to last
Each release is a fixed snapshot. The plan is to deposit these with a permanent archive (a citable DOI, mirrored to the Internet Archive) and to keep the record under a small stewardship trust, so it survives a lost account or a single pair of hands. The rules it holds itself to are written down and meant to travel with the data: the charter.
Cite as: Hingham Lives, "High Street Cemetery burial record," v2026-06-29, hingham-lives.pages.dev. Released under CC BY 4.0.