Bringing in old records, and the public grave finder

Most parish cemeteries have decades of paper or spreadsheet history. The Import chip brings those old records in carefully, one verified row at a time — nothing is created in your cemetery without a human confirming it first.

Bring in a batch

• 1. In Import, start a batch and either paste your master-sheet CSV or attach a photograph of a register page. A pasted sheet can be up to 3 MB of text (many thousands of rows); a page photograph up to 5 MB. Anything larger is refused with a plain message before the batch is created — paste your sheet in two halves, or take the photo again at a slightly smaller size.
• 2. For a CSV, Vianney suggests how your columns match its fields — confirm or adjust the mapping.
• 3. Vianney sorts the rows into three kinds: an occupant (someone actually buried there), a plot marker (a space with no personal burial recorded, like a family plot label), or a living plot holder (a name with no death on record — someone who holds rights but hasn't been buried yet).
• 4. Review the rows in each group and verify them — one at a time, or as a batch once you've checked them. A row only becomes real cemetery data once you verify it.

If two staff members try to verify or reject the same row at the same time, the second one gets a plain "already decided" message pointing at the interment the first one created — nothing is silently overwritten or duplicated.

Living holders are never auto-converted

A row Vianney sorts as a living holder never becomes an owned right by itself. It queues on a "possible rights holders" list for your office to convert into a real, historical right later — with the actual deed or documentation in hand. This protects against a spreadsheet quietly granting rights nobody can verify.

The AI photo option

If your parish has the AI add-on and has turned it on in Settings → AI add-on, you'll see "Propose rows from photo" — Vianney reads a photographed register page and proposes rows in the same format as a CSV import. The AI only ever *proposes*; you still verify every single row it suggests, exactly as you would a pasted spreadsheet. Like the rest of Vianney's AI helpers, this is metered usage under your plan.

The public grave finder

Vianney can offer a public /graves page where visitors search for a burial by name — it's off by default and you turn it on per cemetery in that cemetery's settings. Visitors see only a name, the year they died, and the section or space — never birth dates, cause of death, or anything about who holds the rights. The page always carries a courtesy line pointing visitors to contact the office for certified information.

Tips

• Importing is held behind the Data import permission. Father, the administrator, the deacon, and the parish office hold it as it ships; your parish can widen or narrow that in the role-access matrix. A staff member without it will find the Import screen refuses to load a batch — see Roles and what each can see.
• See Cemetery: what the module covers for how imported records line up with the rest of the module.