Historical cemetery

 
 

It all started when…

  • Marc told me that he bought the cemetery and church across the street from his house

  • The official, complete cemetery records were lost in a fire about 60 years ago

  • The cemetery has historical significance, with graves dating back to the early 1700s

Getting to work

  • I spent weeks trudging through the cemetery with my laptop and a folding table, reading what I could from each of the stones, and building a database of the information, facing stones that were damaged, fallen over, or otherwise unreadable

  • I converted the Excel spreadsheet to a SQL database, and standardized/sanitized the input

  • Marc then introduced me to a local historian who had extensive knowledge of the history of the church and the notable families who were connected with it

  • We found a second record from 1949 in the archives at the local historical society, and I very carefully merged this record with my own database to form a much more complete record, including dozens more records from stones that were damaged or otherwise illegible during my survey in 2016.

Mapping

  • To take the project to the next level, I borrowed Marc’s aerial camera and, using some trigonometry, mapped out a way to take a grid of pictures that could be combined into a massive aerial map. There were 489 pictures in total.

  • I was able to combine up to 20 images together using the [!!!!] tool in Photoshop, but the composite image would distort if I tried to combine any more than that.

  • I learned through an acquaintance that it would be impossible to combine hundreds of images together in this way without using a supercomputer, so I will need to re-take images from far higher up, so that there are less of them.

The end goal

  • My end goal was to create a massive composite image, and then separate it into tiles, using some APIs and touch regions to create a zoomable, Google Earth-style map of the cemetery, where clicking on a gravestone would reveal all of the information that the record contained about that particular person.

  • I also have plans for a flexible search feature for the database itself that would allow people to search for names, years, or any other information in the database.

This project is currently on hold, as I have yet to re-shoot the aerial images. Marc’s drone is currently inoperable, so I will need to find another way to shoot the images.