Hadleyville Cemetery; Creating an Attribute Based Geographic Information System for Grave Organization


Background:
A geographic information system can offer an innovative solution to many problems in todays society. For this project in particular, a small local cemetery requested assistance with the production of records and locations about burial plots. Located in the Town of Pleasant Valle, WI, the Hadleyville cemetery approached the University with a problem it faced which recently came to light. The community about the cemetery records had been lost during a move of government buildings some years ago. The cemetery had no official documents pertaining to the location and status of the 120 grave sites. The loss of the original maps and records presented a particular challenge for this project because the cemetery contains grave stones dating back to 1865, which have become difficult to read from age, are broken or missing.
An attribute based GIS can provide a solution to this challenge by supplementing locational attributes, with a table of ancillary data to create a "smart" map which allows users to interact with the map of grave sites. To construct the GIS, a survey grade GPS (accuracy < 6in) will provide the location of the headstones, which will be supplemented with the names and information from a in person field study. The over arching goals of the project are to preserve community history by developing a detailed accurate map to define the burial lots of the cemetery, to eliminate the same burial plot being sold to two people by mistake, and to identify as many head stones and burials as possible.
Methods:
The sampling technique which will be used to collect the locational data is implementing a grid pattern. This will provide the most ground coverage with the fewest amount of overlap. The equipment which will be used is __________________________________.
Once the data is collected, it can be transfered into a GIS program named Esri's ArcMaps for further processing. This can be rather time consuming on the technicians part, but the positives to this work flow provide a much greater benefit to the alternatives. ArcMap allows an attribute table to by attached to the location of each grave. The attribute table can provide all the information necessary for the efficient functioning of the cemetery in a modern society.

Conclusion:
The methods provide our project with the necessary means to achieve the overall goals and objectives of the project. By mapping the cemetery with an accurate GPS , combined with physically collecting the attribute data allows for the least amount of error, while offering a cost effective and accurate mapping solution to the challenges and goals presented.