Buried archives: Developing a geospatial database of maple grove cemetery
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Abstract
Cemeteries across the world provide a vast amount of information about the regional communities they were built within. While this information can be gathered and analyzed as is, adding in the geospatial element provides further information for both a researcher and a layperson about the communities that developed these places of rest. As cemeteries have changed form throughout human existence, having this additional geospatial information gives a new perspective on burials. Maple Grove Cemetery in Wichita, Kansas is of the Victorian style Rural Landscape cemetery. It is designed, organized and landscaped with the intention of providing the living with a place of beauty and repose as they grief for and visit their dead. While ultimately the place is for the burial of a community’s dead, it is also a place highly used by the living and the spatial design of such reflects that. Furthermore, rural cemeteries are highly reflective of the traditions, values and perspectives of the regional communities that have built them. This work is an effort to begin a fully realized geospatial database of the over twenty-four thousand graves currently on forty of the sixty available acres at Maple Grove Cemetery. GPS data, interment records, lot sale receipts, and images of headstones have been gathered and curated with the objective of merging all of it into a searchable open access geospatial database. ArcGIS Pro as well as ArcGIS Online and Storymaps have been used towards this end.