In Geographic Positioning System (GPS, also known as NAVSTAR) lingo, a waypoint is a notable spot on a route, perhaps a cemetery. In family history, a waypoint might be a notable spot in the life journey of an ancestor, perhaps even death. Recently, these two kinds of waypoints were brought together in a unique survey in North Carolina.

The North Carolina Legislature originally created a Cemetery Survey in 1978. In New Hanover County, the field work for this survey was nearly completed in 1980 by volunteer Leora H. McEachern, with the help of a few others. The original survey was recorded on photocopied forms from the NC Division of Archives and History. Paper maps from the USGS series of 7.5' quadrangles were used to mark locations of burial sites and location by latitude and longitude was interpolated from the maps and recorded on the forms. (This step required using a proportional rule, a tedious and error prone procedure.) Directions to a site included road numbers from the local road markers or from the NC Division of Highways maps for the county; private roads were described but not shown on maps.

Records from the survey are kept in the Local History Room of the New Hanover County Public Library; the record sheets for the 90 cemeteries described and the USGS 7.5' quadrangle maps referred to on the records are available for in-house study or for copying by any library user.

New Hanover is a coastal county and residential development is rapid and at an increasing rate. Some burial sites have recently been moved to make room for private development or public infrastructure. Others, luckily, have been preserved by fencing or simply by avoidance with construction machinery. A few have been destroyed due to neglect, ignorance, or carelessness. One primary goal of the Cemetery Survey has been to make known publicly the existence and location of burial sites or cemeteries in order that they be properly treated.

In the past 18 years many roads and streets have been built by both public and private bodies. Some original roads have been abandoned, others replaced or rerouted. Road names have replaced the local road numbers used in the past. Though Department of Highway maps still show the original numbers, the signposts at the intersections show the newer names. Most written descriptions of locations in the original survey are still quite accurate but incomplete due to these changes. The major public cemeteries are still situated as described in 1980, but some of the smaller family burial sites are more difficult to find. The current description of a location and access to it may read as though the site has moved—when it actually hasn’t.

The severe storms of 1996 were a major factor affecting the condition of burial sites and passage to them. Two hurricanes in quick succession resulted in tremendous damage. Industry, infrastructure, and living people have generally recovered. But some of the dead and their final resting places are still in a very poor state of affairs. Blown-down trees have uprooted some graves and markers, and completely covered others. Clean-up efforts with chainsaws and other equipment sometimes resulted in further damage. Sites that were under full tree cover before are now growing root sprouts and weeds as high as ten feet annually. One or more sites may even have disappeared in storm damage.

The 1980 survey was known to be incomplete and few records have been added since. But besides being incomplete, by 1998, the survey was plainly outdated. Though locating a particular site by reference to the survey was similar to locating any other feature, it had been complicated by the addition of many more private roads and streets and the closing of others. There were still questions about the continued existence and condition of burial sites in light of development and the storm damage mentioned above. An updated survey seemed to be an appropriate response to these problems.

The Updated Survey
Changes since 1980 take many forms. Technology offers the most dramatic changes of the past 18 years, so the first step in the updated survey was to manually transfer some parts of the written records to a computer spreadsheet. This made it easier to edit existing records and add new ones. The flexibility in preparing worksheets, working files, and final reports was very helpful.

Another major advancement is the ability to locate points on the ground using GPS. The GPS relies on radio signals from orbit to receivers on the ground which are capable of triangulating from several satellites to the geographic position of that ground location. Since the release of Selective Availability (SA) signals to civilians, there has been a rapid expansion of applications by recreationists, travelers, surveyors, geographers, and others to whom maps and location are important. The SA signals available to civilian users are somewhat less accurate than those used by the military for whom the system is primarily intended, but adequate for most purposes. The stated limits of accuracy are 100 meters or less horizontally.

Using GPS technology and electronic maps for family history research has been discussed by Dick Eastman and others.¹ The application of the GPS to a cemetery survey appears to be somewhat unique, though it differs very little from other consumer applications. If a user can get within 100 meters or less of an established cemetery, a look around will very often suffice. A single burial site that has been abandoned presents an entirely different problem. To warrant a diligent search of even a small area covered with weeds and vines, the user needs to have confidence in the accuracy of the original description. A major goal of the updated survey has been to describe locations that are accurately reproducible with a minimum of cost or expertise.

The equipment used in the update was a Garmin GPS12 Locator, which may be connected for uploading and downloading data to a Macintosh 68030-class computer running MacGPSPro mapping software—all very modest in cost and very user-friendly. Other materials included data from the original 1980 survey, now entered into a ClarisWorks spreadsheet. A very important part of the dataset were Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) scanned copies of 7.5' quadrangle topographic maps. The six sheets used for this project are available on the Cape Fear W and Beaufort W CD-ROMs from the USGS. The mapping software used DRG images as background maps from which coordinates were recorded and upon which waypoints were superimposed.

The Geographic Name Information Service (GNIS) provided a few additional sites to be added to the initial dataset. Examination of the scanned maps in MacGPSPro disclosed a few more locations to be added to the dataset. Unfortunately, only a very few of the small family cemeteries were shown on these maps. Other easily accessible maps of small or medium scale disclosed no additional sites.

Out and About
Initial field work was simply a matter of following map and GPS directions to those sites accessible by public road. There were a few trips down dead-ends where new roads are closely spaced, but this presented no great difficulty. Private roads required asking directions, a good policy even if the location is well-known, and a real time-saver if location is uncertain. Several small family cemeteries, even some abandoned ones, were re-identified during this initial phase because the original description was accurate and the surrounding landscape hadn’t changed much. Others have escaped re-identification.

For the first time ever, the New Hanover County Tax Office made available the 1998 series of tax maps on CD-ROM. These are very large-scale maps (up to 1 inch = 200 feet) that have been available in paper copies for a number of years. The CD-ROM represents advanced technology made available at the consumer level. Tax cartographers are in the community of surveyors and geographers who use equipment and software beyond the means and grasp of hobbyists. It is hoped that these scanned maps will prove an additional resource in the update.

The Tax Office had earlier provided a paper list of exempt properties which included cemeteries and churches. But their database does not have a searchable field for either cemetery or church nor does it contain coordinate locations of sites. Some names on the tax list are even different than names on the original survey. Reconciliation of the tax list with the cemetery survey list was a manual chore that likely has errors but several more sites were, in fact, disclosed—and with descriptions that made field location feasible. The use of the large-scale paper maps in the field for this particular application is not very desirable because they are bulky. Some smaller-scale copies are also available on smaller sheets, but you then risk losing orientation in the field. A workable solution was to use small-scale maps with written notes from their larger equivalents.

Though the tax list does not directly show map coordinates, the North Carolina State Plane Coordinates (SPC) may be interpreted from the Property Identification Number (PIN), which is listed. These coordinates are shown on the USGS 7.5' quadrangles and locations may be manually plotted on the map sheets. Unfortunately, neither the GPS receiver nor the MacGPS software recognize SPCs from any state. Conversion in North Carolina relies upon formulas and tables in the NC Geodetic Survey publication, Development and Application of the State Coordinate System. Though also somewhat tedious, this could be of substantial help if applied early enough in the survey or its update. In this case, the machine translation of tax lists and maps served more to confirm than to inform.

This cemetery survey update was an iterative process of collecting data from several sources, reconciling any differences noted, field checking, reconciling differences found in the field, and editing both tables and maps at each step. Machine and map locations have been complemented by written descriptions of the sites. The USGS quadrangle maps used here conform to National Map Accuracy Standards. That level of accuracy is the principle means of improving upon the Selective Availability limitation of the GPS locations. Written descriptions will become outdated with the passage of years, but the latitude and longitude coordinates should remain easily reproducible.

With latitude and longitude, map, and written descriptions reconciled, we expect sites to be locatable by a total stranger with a minimum of difficulty. Through hard work, the use of several existing datasets, and new technology, the updated survey has been brought to its present point. A future researcher, perhaps armed with an accurate map, latitude/longitude coordinates copied at the library, and a GPS receiver, will be able to find local cemeteries as never before.

¹Dick Eastman. “Locating Cemeteries via Satellite Technology,” Genealogical Computing, 18: 1 (Summer 1998): 32.

Elvin E. Birth is a retired forester with degrees from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Tennessee. Years of practice in locating obscure property corners and other landmarks are currently serving well in documenting the locations of family history events.