I have been cemetery hopping too. I've managed a "first pass" this week
to all of Huntington County's cemeteries. This trip was to get Lat/Lon
coordinates for each cemetery and to assess the condition of each one.
I plan to go back through and start a photographic record as Randy has
described. I used an old county history book that had a section on
cemeteries. It gave a description of each and told me what organization
or individual started the cemetery. It also provided
Range/Township/Section locations for each. Using all this info, I took
a copy of ann old county map (old because there are two Army Corps
reservoirs in the county now. They were built in the 1960s and many
cemeteries were moved. The smaller being incorporated into large
cemeteries.) and placed a locator dot for each cemetery as referenced in
the history. I then took an 1879 Kingman Brothers atlas of Huntington
County and compared the two. This allowed me to verify the text and
also to look for any cemeteries not mentioned. Then I grabbed my
notepad and GPS and started driving. I put 273 miles on my car this
week and never left the county. This whole scenario led the the web
page found at
http://www.citznet.com/~ssattert/hipcrp/cemeteries.html.
During this whole process there were a couple of problems I encountered:
First, If I put this info into a database, how do I key the index for
each cemetery? Not all the cemeteries have names. I engineered an
"interesting" solution. The next problem is: How do describe the
condition of the cemetery without generating a lot of verbage? Again, I
engineered a solution. Both of these "solutions" can be viewed at the
web site stated above. Please take a look and share your opinions. I
would like to see this or something similar adopted as a standard.
Scott Satterthwaite
Indiana Pioneer Cemeteries Restoration Project State Coordinator
http://www.citznet.com/~ssattert/inpcrp/