Indexing and mapping the Mt. Zion Baptist Cemetery
2010 Eagle Scout Project - York County - McConnells, SC
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For over 100 years, the Scouts BSA (formerly known as Boy Scouts of America) have had many achieve their highest rank of Eagle Scout. What many may not be aware of, is that to achieve this rank, one must earn required badges, devote hours to campouts and leadership opportunities, and choose a final project that will provide a service to their community. Candidates then present the culmination of all they have done to a board of review for final inspection, including what they have chosen to do for their final project and how they plan to make it happen prior to being awarded the rank of Eagle Scout.
Choosing a final project
At the beginning of 2010, a young scout by the name of Adam Jensen, was trying to figure out what he could do for an eagle scout project before his 18th birthday. If a scout does not complete all the requirements before he turns 18, he will not be able to earn the award.
Adam shares a love of history with his mother, and during this time she was working for the York County Cultural and Heritage Museum in upstate South Carolina. As many ideas were considered for the final project, it happened that Adam's mother Denise had recently had a discussion with a descendant of former slaves that lived at the nearby plantation of the Bratton family (today known as Brattonsville ). She was researching her ancestry and working with Denise as a trained genealogist to gather more information. One of the challenges of researching African American ancestry is that individual and family information was often not recorded prior to or after the Civil War. To gather birth and death records, one might have to go to the place of burial hoping to find a headstone or church records on site. In 2010, no African American cemeteries had ever been indexed and recorded in York County, South Carolina. After a lot of thought and discussion, it was decided that indexing the cemetery at Mt. Zion Baptist Church would be Adam's eagle project.
Helping Hands
There is a saying that many hands make light work, and Eagle projects are also about bringing people together to work as a group for the benefit of the community. This project was going to need many helping hands.
To index a cemetery, a record of each burial needs to gather the information on the headstone. Unfortunately, gathering this information isn't as easy as it may seem.
A history of marking burials
At Mt. Zion Baptist Church, many burial locations are only known to family members, and often were not marked with a headstone because a family could not afford one. Occasionally in place of a headstone, a morticians marker marked the site. Mortician markers were often made of thin metal with a paper insert and would easily be tarnished over time by weather conditions eventually making them difficult to read or unreadable. Other methods of marking a grave would be to plant a tree at the burial site, with or without a headstone. But, tree planting also presented a problem. Roots can impact the burial site and overtime they may completely cover the site with offshoots from the planted tree and other foliage. Lastly, many burial sites would have no marker and their location would only be known by members of the family.
Overgrowth throughout the cemetery hid many burial locations and had to be cleared before the site could be indexed.
Removing overgrowth to locate hidden gravesites
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Putting the project together
To make this all happen, the following needed to be accomplished.
- Create sign-up sheets for volunteers to meet two Saturdays in a row for cemetery clearing and clean up.
- Ask volunteers to bring tools to clear brush, weeds, and tree saplings. Trucks and trailers to move debris to an open burn area on the cemetery property.
- Additional sign-up sheet for volunteers to record headstone and burial marker information, and provide notepads and pencils.
- Coordinate the work with the local pastor and members of Mt. Zion's congregation to assist with the work and provide burial information.
- Work with local grocer to donate food for providing on-site lunch to volunteers.
- Contact volunteer fire department to provide personnel and equipment to be on hand while burning debris during the day.
- Coordinate the work for the two Saturdays scheduled.
Volunteers were gathered from the BSA Troop sponsor congregations throughout York County, with an outreach to family and neighbors to participate, along with members of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church. The latter were also asked to fill out a marker with burial information and place the marker in the cemetery accordingly for sites that had no physical marker.
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Clearing and Indexing
The cemetery is two parts, the upper section near the church, and the lower section. Indexing began right away on gravesites that were visible, while other sites were being cleared.
The lower section had a lot of overgrowth that needed to be cleared before the sites could be indexed. Most of the labor occurred in the lower section of the cemetery during both scheduled Saturday's.
As the clearing of the cemetery continued, volunteers were now marking each gravesite with an ID number on a flag or PVC pipe marker. Flags were used on burials that had a physical marker with readable information. PVC markers, with an attached 3x5 card, were distributed to members of the Mt. Zion Baptist church. The card had an ID number that matched the ID number on the PVC marker. The member would mark the location of their ancestors burial with the PVC marker and fill out the card with information, such as birth and death dates, etc. and then deliver the card to one of the assigned coordinators.
Digital Record
As each gravesite was indexed and information recorded, a picture of each site with any type of physical marker was taken and attached to an Excel Spreadsheet. A final printed and digital copy of the completed indexed spreadsheet would then be sent to the McCelvey Center Archives and York County Library, in York South Carolina. For the first time in York County, patrons would be able to search this new information using the counties available search systems.
Mapping it out
The original intent of this project was to index and gather the information in the Mt. Zion Baptist cemetery, and provide the records to the county archives. However, when an Eagle scouts father works for the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) industry leader , the index and information in his mind is just the first part of the project. It's one thing to be able to search archived information, but it's also important to know where the gravesites are located within the cemetery boundaries for future reference.
At first, mapping the cemetery seemed like it might be the easiest part of the whole project. After all, with technology like GPS, and mobile applications to gather the locations and grave ID's this should allow for a simple join between the collected spatial data and the newly created digital index. Without access to a high-end GPS antenna and equipment for this project, the current technology and the surrounding trees offered little to no accuracy for collecting the points of each gravesite with our Trimble GPS unit. Instead, an older and more tedious method was used to gather each location - known ground control points using aerial imagery.
The whole purpose of the map and using the capabilities of GIS was to allow others to know how to quickly find the area where family and loved ones had been laid to rest.
We used the property boundary lines, trees, dirt road and large grave sites that are visible on aerial imagery along with other notable landmarks in the cemetery to map the closest approximation for each gravesite that was identified during the cleanup and indexing. It was actually faster to use these ground control locations for reference and then use Esri's ArcPad application on a handheld Trimble GPS unit running Windows CE to manually add a point for each gravesite.
Collected data was then imported from the handheld unit into a workgroup geodatabase .
Using Esri's ArcMap application, we could display the data within a map, along with boundary data of the cemetery, church location and other landmarks that we created as additional datasets in the geodatabase using available satellite imagery for reference. Together, the data would provide the spatial information for the planned wall map and map book.
We wanted to create a simple, clean map that was easy to read and use for those who would eventually use the map to locate gravesites within the cemetery. Using the layout view in ArcMap, the data was compiled first to create a wall map, that would have a top view of the cemetery on the left, and known graves labeled with a grave ID number. The map would also have custom zones to aid in quickly finding where a given grave ID may be located. On the right side of the map, ArcMap provided the tools where a burial index could be created for each grave ID and the zone that it was located. The index could then be added to the map layout for final export to a .pdf format and plotted.
Final wall map that was plotted and presented to Mt. Zion Baptist Church.
A map book was also created to provide greater detail of grave locations within the custom zones on the map. Together the two could be used by the church to quickly locate graves throughout the cemetery.
The church also had a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, that contained pictures of gravesites with a physical marker. Unfortunately, while the maps could help locate a gravesite on the map, this approach only gave you the location. To view a picture of the headstone, you would then have to find the matching grave ID in the spreadsheet to view a picture of the headstone or marker if one was available.
With today's capabilities, the static maps that were created earlier can now be dynamically available to a wider audience using technology that most of us have with smartphones and laptops. To take the project to the next level, we migrated all the data from a workgroup geodatabase to a file geodatabase . Using the file geodatabase in ArcGIS Pro (the current version of Esri's GIS desktop software), we enabled the gravesite feature class for attachments . This created a relationship class that would store photos for gravesites that had a picture of the headstone or marker. Once all pictures were added, the data could then be selected and configured to show specific attributes and the photo if present.
The next step was to then publish the data to ArcGIS Online . The benefit of publishing data that has had attachments enabled and pictures added, is that all of these attributes are included in the new hosted feature layer online. We can see these benefits in this web map using built in search capabilities. No GIS experience is needed. Give it a try!
At the top left of the map shown here, is a Search icon 🔍. You might need to expand the map to full size by pressing the double arrow button in the upper right. Click the search icon and then type the name Bowen. Select one of the names and then use the + button (or pinch to zoom) on the bottom right corner of the map to zoom into the selected marker. Use your mouse to then click on the selected marker or touch it on your smartphone touchscreen for additional information.
We can also interact with the map using the Mt. Zion Baptist Cemetery Viewer app built using Esri's Instant Apps. The Attachment Viewer Template was used for this project. Click the box below to see this app in action!
Instead of a static map on the wall or a static map book, the instant app can be referenced with the URL or even better a QR code. It now makes the data more relevant, and more dynamic! It's GIS for everyone, everywhere!
Bringing members of the community together for a common goal.
It took a lot of people and work to accomplish the indexing and mapping eagle project of the Mt. Zion Baptist Cemetery. Over 500+ volunteer hours were selflessly given to this community effort. The information gathered can now be searched through county archives, and mapping provides us with the ability to quickly locate the areas where those who have passed have been laid to rest. Unfortunately, there are still some unknowns in this active cemetery, but we do know that the recorded information will always be a great asset for the families whose ancestors have been laid to rest in this quiet, peaceful place in York County, South Carolina.
The cemetery as of May 2022. Overgrowth 10 years after the project can once again be seen over a few gravesites in the picture on the far right (red oval).
With the evolution of technology always moving forward, options of having this project continue will be considered by reviewing ways to update the cemeteries information since the cleanup, indexing and mapping was completed in 2011. Making the data available online today is a part of future considerations for this project.
Serving others
We hoped you enjoyed learning more about this 2010 Eagle Project and how volunteers had an opportunity to provide service to the members of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church indexing and mapping of their cemetery. We encourage everyone to look for opportunities to serve in their communities, assisting local scouting organizations, food banks, animal shelters, neighbors, etc. Afterall, we could all use a helping hand every now and then, and random acts of kindness always bring joy to both the giver and receiver. 😍
We also wish to recognize how this project could not have been completed without the help of all the 50+ members of the York County South Carolina community who volunteered and provided their time, tools, labor and love for the benefits that this effort has provided for the descendants of those who are buried in the Mt. Zion Baptist Cemetery.
Special thanks to the folks at the Bethesda Volunteer Fire department for supplying equipment and fire supervision and to Rock Hill Publix Grocery for donating food to feed our selfless volunteers.