Creating a cemetery map

Creating a cemetery map

Overview

Parish Online Mapping can be used to plot the locations of graves and store information about them. We don't do physical on-site surveys of your cemetery (there are lots of companies that can do that), but the software can be used as your primary source of cemetery records.

Functionality

Parish Online Mapping has two pre-created layers you can use to store your information;

Cemetery Boundaries

Found under the Cemeteries collection, this is a collaborative layer (meaning other Parish Online Mapping users can see your information, and vice versa) which can be used for drawing out the extent of your cemetery sites. Attribution can be included to store information about that cemetery; e.g. religious designation, land ownership and capacity.



To use this layer, draw a new area fully encapsulating the whole cemetery site, then add the information about it.

The layer is useful for seeing the distribution of cemetery sites across the country.

Cemetery Plots

Also found under the Cemeteries collection, this layer is where you draw out the individual plots and record information about who is buried there.


A great way to plot these is to use the rectangle tool in the Feature Editor. This allows you to plot an exact standard grave plot. You might like to switch the aerial photography layer on when doing this as you can often make out the cemetery plots using the "satellite" mode.



Be aware, this may get tedious if you need to do hundreds, so if you have lots of them it may be worth getting a cemetery survey done and for them to provide the data to us in a GIS format such as shapefile or geopackage.

Limitations

This is not currently a system for large scale cemeteries and full management, but for many smaller councils where there are only a small number of burials a year, this is a very cost effective solution.


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