Over the past three years, as a result of a number of project assignments, Hunter Research has been developing a new specialty in cemetery recordation. This expertise has grown out of two challenging endeavors completed for the Greater New Jersey Conference of the United Methodist Church. This work entailed researching and field-inventorying seven “orphan” Methodist cemeteries scattered across New Jersey and resulted in the creation of a cemetery-specific geographic information system (CGIS) for each burial ground. The CGIS allows users to identify through an interactive map the locations of memorialized individuals within a cemetery. Also accessible through the CGIS are photographs of grave markers and monuments linked to the memorialized individuals and relevant web links to www.findagrave.com. The CGIS is a tool of immense potential benefit to cemetery managers and persons intent on pinpointing the whereabouts of a particular memorialized individual, be they relatives, friends, researchers or the merely curious. We are presently applying this same methodology in a study of the Pennington African Cemetery in Pennington, New Jersey.
