In a previous post I talked about my aunt that died and we couldn’t find the cemetery. Found it! Welcome to the Bethel Cemetery.
I will tip my hat to the inherent creepiness of the whole thing. Who is rising second?
So I want to add cemeteries to OSM.
In my first adventure with Find-A-Grave, I came up with 167 cemeteries. Probably 70% had a lat long. Some were duplicates. Some that didn’t have a lat long had an address or at least enough of a description I might find it without driving there. The find-a-grave site has been pretty awesome because people do about as well as they can describing a cemetery. I get alternate names. I get a grave count. I may even get a physical description which could be “a 1/2 mile down XYZ Road”.
So now I have this:
The red dot being find-a-grave. Yellow being the OSM cemetery. Red being the parcel boundary. In this case – the yellow will work because I am questioning some of the parcel boundaries. I have found a few parcels marked as cemeteries but the aerial imagery doesn’t bear that out as you will see below. I’ve stood at two cemeteries in this county with 2 graves. Two graves with modest sized head stones are going to be hard to see with the imagery I have access to.
Occasionally you find:
Two parcels marked as a cemetery. One with visible graves not in OSM. Possibly the second was “expansion”. At my dad’s family’s cemetery that’s a worry. “What if we run out of room?”. Which is a larger problem than you might consider because once a year everyone that has family buried there visits and takes up a small collection. Money goes to physical maintenance and yard maintenance. There is an informal inventory on how much usable room is left and if an adjacent landowner will donate some…or can they buy some.
So what happens now? I do a few every day. I expect I will end up with about 100 Cemeteries with about 40 I can’t identify from all my clues. Maybe I’ll spend a day driving around and do some searching. Maybe not. Overall this has been pretty fun as a small side project to clear my head. More news coming as I trudge along.
