Overview

Here are several ways to find the location of a pet that is buried in Friendship Grove. The first is to look for the owner's last name in an alphabetical list, which color-codes to a cemetery map highlighting the section the pet is in. All 2443 records are shown, even if no location information is available.

The second way is to search a section-ordered list of gravesites (by either the owner's name or pet's name) with the Find function (usually control or command - f) of your browser. Although relatively low-tech, this method preserves the context of the particular record in the list, as well as showing all other "hits." This in-context view is particularly useful if you have a marker that has become damaged, allowing you to also see gravesites that may be on either side of the one you are looking for. Because these records are ordered by section, then row, then lot, records that have no section or row are, unfortunately, not included in this list.

These incomplete records are searchable from the following two lists. There is a relatively long list of records where Section is recorded but the Row is not recorded. In this list, the records are sorted by Lot within each Section. To the extent that Lot numbers correspond to actual ordered pieces of ground, assigning rows to lot numbers will just take "lots" of time verifying these plots on-site.

The most difficult to find will be those graves whose Section is not recorded or is otherwise invalid. Without the record of the Section, the act of finding these gravesites will most likely come by memory, from someone familiar with the particular site, or by accident, in a more thorough census of the entire cemetery. For example, Colleen will remember the section and row where Santanna is buried, and will also remember when he died. This is currently part of the "missing" information. It is also possible that the information is available through some other source, or is actually in the card file (which I have never seen) but did not make it to Mark's spreadsheet.

Additional Thoughts

With 2400 records to deal with, I wrote formulas to process this data into a more useful form—for example, splitting the column that recorded both row and lot into two columns, one for row, one for lot, both integers, so that 2 would follow 1 instead of 199. I haven't attempted to clean up the problematic data and it is possible that by referring to the original source, one could make a better guess at how these records should have been parsed. While worth looking into, I fear that there will be no substitute for an actual feet-on-the-ground campaign to straighten out the rest. From what I have seen I am confident that most of what seems right here will also check out on the ground. I am also confident that there will be errors to correct, even from data that seems to make sense.

These are where we are samples that show the state of the records as they now are. They are a read-only access to the database, with four useful queries to show different aspects of the state of your data, selections that range from "perfection only" to "just the warts." You could make a decision right now about how many warts you will make public, how to explain them or turn them into volunteer (labor or funding) requests.

The interesting part about these four views comes from the possibility of hooking a read-and-write version of them to a database management system, where you could use the most appropriate view to access any record for updating and corrections from any location that has access to the internet, including Bald Hill Road, via a mobile connection. With this excitement comes this. Making public whatever amount of this data that seems appropriate will beg the Humane Society to restore or replace, at the very least, the section markers, none of which are actually marked with the Section's letter, and several which are just missing. (It may be that there have never been markers on the Bald Hill Road side, or that I have not found them. The single markers really do need that second point to define the visual line between one section and the next.) Ideally, there would also be an on-the-ground indication of where the rows are supposed to be. And if the actual logic to the rows is no longer apparent, some re-gridding plan (suggested by our Group 3) might be considered.

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge the contribution that was made by Connie France (Colleen, you'll understand the mixup with your name) in linking data to physical space. With no other information, her document was the rosetta stone that allowed us to connect raw data to physical space. I hope she will forgive me for taking the liberty to consider hers a working document, as I added to it (in pencil) the location of existing section markers, prominent trees, and approximate (paced) distances between sections. Her information, the last grave in one section, the first grave in the next, permitted me to establish an imaginary boundary for the markers that are now missing.

I'll stop, though there is more that I am grinding around. If you have questions, feel free to call.

Woody Packard
585 232-1187
wood@woodypackard.com