Cemetery template

[JoshWhite]

I am wondering if anyone has done any work with a cemetery in GIS before.  I am working on the dataset for my City's cemetery and am well along with it but I am always looking for ways to make this more efficient.  Its a relatively small cemetery compared to some in the country but there are still nearly 13000 graves plus all of the deeded and available spaces.  There are a number of templates out there for other applications but none for cemeteries.

[BethanyHall]

ksjosh82

I do a lot with cemeteries in GIS. Are you trying to map the location of each grave along with section boundaries and so forth? I have borrowed some template ideas from my experience using AutoCAD years ago. For each cemetery I work on, I create a base map similar to something a surveyor would use such as a site survey with property boundaries, owner information, site location map with title blocks on the side. I have attached a sample for you to view. I used the standard landscape modern inset template supplied through Arcmap and just tweaked the data frames and text boxes to how I wanted it to look.

Just some ideas to help get you going, I hope and feel free to drop me note if you need help or other ideas.

[JoshWhite]

I appreciate your response.  I am actually creating a webmap as the presenation format.  Its in Flex right now and it seems to work.  I was most interested in learning about difficulties, annotation, labeling, scale used etc.  Of course, I am limited by the data that I have as always.  Some background, the original plats were scanned and put into CAD.  Some of the measurements are missing or just inaccurate.   I brought in the CAD lines of the lots and adjusted them as necessary.  For the individual spaces, I used the lot cards and generally just divided the lots into equal spaces.  My biggest hurdle has been the lack of measurements.  The only way to fix these problems would be to set the corners of each lot and space and resurvey them all which would cost a fortune and is not a feasible project.  The newest section was properly surveyed in the first place so it is not an issue.  I am primarily working on the spaces at 1:50 scale and I turn on the aerial imagery for spot checking but it doesn't usually match up properly so its usually turned off.  Have you run into any of these issues, how did you resolve them?

[BethanyHall]

Flex is awesome! Which version are you using? I am learning it and I haven't quite figured out how to get my cemetery annotation geodatabases to play nicely with Flex showing my annotation feature classes for labeling and such but I am new to Flex, too.

Many of the cemeteries I am working on are all pre-20th century cemeteries and aligning the hand drawn line drawings are so much fun! The best you can do is eyeball accuracy and I include disclaimers on anything that is not survey grade concerning accuracy. I use the aerial imagery to eyeball the grave location and then apply the time appropriate burial methods to determine if the headstone is in the right location. For example, Christian burials usually have the head on the west side of the grave and the feet facing east so when the dead are called up to Heaven on Christ's return, they will be in the correct position to rise and follow him home to their reward. I didn't make this stuff up but I consulted several local archaeologists and I followed them out to do a survey on a local cemetery. It was a lot of fun!

I do use the 1"=50' scale for most of my projects. It is an easy scale to use and most lay people understand it. I will try to post some examples of my annotation and eyeball surveying for the lots I have encountered. I know it is not very precise but most of the projects I have work on are just happy to have something mapped.

[JoshWhite]

I'm currently using version 2.5 and looking forward to the 3.0 release but I don't think they plan to release it until they release 10.1. 

That's more or less the same experience I'm having.  Currently, I'm not using much annotation, just regular labels but I haven't had much input on the user end yet, so that may change.  What are you annotating?  The burial information or just the plat info?