Recording Cemeteries - What's Next?

[About.com]: What kind of funding have you received for the project, and what is the funding intended to do?

[Gregory Vogel]: The Fayetteville Evergreen Cemetery Association received funding from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Department of Arkansas Heritage to help make the resources available on-line. A major portion of this is the interactive map, which requires web-development skills far beyond my capabilities. The grant funding has allowed us to use the resources of the University of Arkansas' Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST), and to have CAST personnel serve as consultants. This has been a great help, but I still have quite a bit to do!

What will happen to the work now that you've left Arkansas?

I'm still working on the project, but since I'm not in Fayetteville the project is progressing a little more slowly. The volunteers are still recording features (the volunteers pick areas of the cemetery to record at their own schedule), and I'm entering forms into the database here in the evenings and on weekends. I've stopped predicting when everything will be completed but I plan a major update of the site this fall. In a way, the project will never be completely "finished", because we will always be able to add more information about the cemetery and the people buried there.

I really like the idea of cemeteries as teaching tools, and have begun more cemetery-related projects in my new position (at the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois). We recently received a "Save Our History" grant from the History Channel to engage local high school students to record Schumann Cemetery just outside of Kampsville. Schumann Cemetery is very interesting (I think they all are, really)--it was active from the 1840s until about the 1950s. It is a relatively small cemetery (40 to 50 interments), and the writing on at least one of the older stones is German. There are about 20 burials marked by plain stone slabs, and we aren't sure who these people are. There is some speculation that they were victims of a cholera epidemic--maybe on a boat going to or from St. Louis (Kampsville is right on the Illinois River). The cemetery is mostly overgrown now and difficult to access. The students will clean, map, and record the cemetery in detail, and conduct background research and oral history interviews with descendents of the people buried there. At the end of the project the students will conduct an open seminar to share their information with the community, and we'll create a web site and pamphlet about the cemetery as well. This cemetery is much smaller than Evergreen, so the project should be completed in less than a year. Check the Center for American Archeology website next summer (www.caa-archeology.org) for the results!

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