Montgomery County Cemetery Inventory Revisited
MPI is proud to report completion of this wide-ranging, cutting-edge, urgent, amazing project.
Coordinator Glenn Wallace and project director Eileen McGuckian describe MCCI-R as a significant update of the Montgomery County Cemetery Inventory in terms of data, technology, and accessibility. During 2018, staff trained 90 volunteers to visit all known burial sites in Montgomery County. Project volunteers assessed conditions, completed survey forms, noted GPS coordinates, conducted additional research, and took a variety of photographs to capture the current environment. Staff converted all previous efforts into Excel spreadsheets, added new sites and ID numbers, provided FindaGrave links or created new entries, and utilized maps and other sources to garner additional data.
As a result of this project, solid new information is available on Montgomery County cemeteries. Each survey contains additional fields (ownership, safety concerns, designation status). New sites were added, some sites believed lost were found, and a few sites erroneously thought to be cemetery locations were removed from the list. Another result—bolstered by two local protection laws passed in 2017, effective in 2018—was more attention to and concern about local burial sites.
The Final Report, submitted in December 2018, includes Summaries and Statistics derived from MCCI-R project, Recommendations for Moving Forward and Next Steps, and multiple specific lists of sites: endangered sites to watch, to survey with GPS, in need of clean-up and improvements, African American sites, sites to revisit in winter and those pending further research.