There are at least 5 reasons to map your cemetery before the end of the year. As the calendar winds toward year-end, now is the ideal time to prioritize your cemetery mapping project. Whether you’re responsible for a historic burial ground or a growing municipal cemetery, accurate mapping is essential for effective management, compliance, and community trust. At ViaVista Mapping, we specialize in using GPS, GIS, and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) in cemeteries to help cemetery operators modernize their records and preserve history for generations to come.

If you’ve been considering cemetery mapping, here are five compelling reasons to start your project before the end of the year:

One of the 5 Reasons to Map Your Cemetery is to Take Advantage of Budget Year Deadlines

Many organizations operate on a fiscal calendar that resets in January. Allocating funds now allows you to use remaining budget before it disappears—especially if your organization has “use it or lose it” policies. Even if you’re not ready for full deployment, booking a preliminary survey or consultation can secure your place on the schedule.

Optimal Field Conditions

Late summer and early fall provide some of the best weather conditions for fieldwork. Dry ground, long daylight hours, and stable weather make it easier for our team to collect high-accuracy GPS data and perform cemetery GPR scans without weather-related delays. Waiting too long may mean postponing work until spring.

Get a Head Start on Spring Projects

Mapping now means you’ll be ready to hit the ground running in the new year. With updated records, digital maps, and burial inventory in hand, your team can plan spring cleanups, maintenance, expansions, or new plot sales with confidence and clarity.

Stay Ahead of Compliance & Recordkeeping Needs

More and more municipalities and private cemeteries are being asked to maintain transparent, accessible records. GPS and cemetery GPR mapping provide an auditable, digital foundation for everything from sales to historical preservation. By completing your mapping project now, you’ll be well-positioned for audits, grant applications, or public inquiries that may arise in the coming year.

Last but not least of the top 5 reasons to map your cemetery is to Preserve History and Honor the Departed

Every season brings changes to the landscape—erosion, overgrowth, weather damage, or development pressures. Mapping your cemetery now captures the current condition and ensures every grave, marked or unmarked, is accounted for and protected. It’s one of the most meaningful steps you can take to preserve heritage and honor those laid to rest.

Wrapping up the top 5 reasons to map your cemetery . . .

Let’s Make It Happen

If you’re ready to modernize your records, locate unmarked graves, or simply gain peace of mind, we’d love to help.

Contact us today to discuss your cemetery’s needs and reserve your spot on our calendar.

Additional Resource

If you’re seeking funding or need more background on digital recordkeeping in cemeteries, check out this helpful guide from the National Preservation Institute:
Digital Cemetery Recordkeeping and Mapping: Best Practices (npi.org)

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Are you in charge of a private or public cemetery?  Do you have missing or incorrect records that are causing major issues? Digital cemetery mapping services could be the answer you’re looking for.  There are numerous affordable cemetery mapping options, using state-of-the art equipment and software, that will help manage and develop your memorial grounds.  

The pricing for mapping services varies greatly between cemeteries and is dependent on several factors.  Size of the cemetery has the biggest influence on the cost for digital cemetery mapping.  Additional factors that are often considered when generating a proposal include age of the cemetery, grave density of the cemetery, tree cover, and accessibility.  Mobilization expenses vary greatly from one provider to another, depending on their geographic range.  The overall cost of services will include these factors and also the provide for maintaining equipment and software needed to generate the cemetery mapping.

Not All Cemetery Mapping Services Providers Are the Same

Having a current and accurate cemetery map is a key tool for cemetery managers, but budgets for most cemeteries are not an unlimited resource.  For cemeteries that are actively adding new burials, it becomes more of a challenge to keep the map up to date.  When contracting with a company, it’s important to address your current needs, future plans, and also enable ongoing updates to the cemetery map in order to optimize the money spent.  In addition, does the cemetery mapping services provider have experience with GPR, GPS, and building cemetery maps on a GIS platform?

How to Optimize Your Cemetery Mapping Budget

The first goal of cemetery mapping is to document the current state of the cemetery through a combination of GPR and GPS.  Another important goal of the project is to help improve the day-to-day operations of the cemetery and also provide a process for keeping the cemetery data information up to date.

Every cemetery is unique, and the approach to cemetery mapping should be focused on individual customer needs.  A services provider should start by having a conversation about your needs and then provide you with a detailed proposal that explains how the services will help you achieve your goals.

A basic cemetery mapping package includes:

• GPR:  Ground penetrating radar scans of all relevant areas of the cemetery to identify unmarked burials and significant underground anomalies. 
• GPS:  GPS collection with GNSS-enabled, high-accuracy GPS equipment to map all existing burial markers, coping areas, fences, decorative features, and other pertinent features of the cemetery.  The GPS point of each burial monument and relevant feature are collected, and burial markers and physical features are photographed.
• GIS:  The data from GPR and GPS data collected in the field is processed to create a custom, interactive and dynamic online map of the cemetery on a GIS platform using GPS and photographic data collected onsite. 
• Dynamic, interactive, and easily shared burial plot map:  The finished digital cemetery map is made available to the client via URL/online access and will be accessible from any device that has internet access.  Print capability will be enabled to facilitate pdf/paper printouts on demand at various scale settings.  In addition, large-format architectural size maps will be created and provided to the client via pdf files.

This basic cemetery mapping package provides cemetery managers with the up-to-date documentation needed to understand the current state of the cemetery, provide visitors with accurate information about burial locations, and is a good start for planning future cemetery needs.

Optional value-added comprehensive cemetery mapping services include:

• Digitizing existing plot ownership information:  Pertinent plot ownership information from existing records is incorporated into the digital cemetery map to enable visibility of ownership status for empty plots.
• Optimizing available space for additional burial plots:  The open spaces in the cemetery are evaluated for availability of additional burial plots, and the digital cemetery map and large-format prints are updated to include the newly available plots.
• Design and pinning of new cemetery mapping sections:  A burial plot layout is designed for new or undeveloped areas of the cemetery.  The burial plot layout will be consistent with existing cemetery layout and plot numbering system.  A pinning layout is developed, and aluminum survey pins are installed in the cemetery to provide guidance when excavating new burials.  The newly designed burial plot layout and pin locations are incorporated into the digital cemetery map and large-format prints.
• Periodic Updates:  New burials are added to the digital cemetery map and large-format prints at a frequency determined by cemetery management

These additional cemetery mapping options add substantial value and provide cemetery managers with the information and documentation needed to enable growth, plan for the future, and maximize the value of cemetery mapping investment dollars.

See an overview of our services HERE.

Find tips for funding preservation projects HERE.

Contact us today find out more about our services and for a free quote.

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Around the country, this is the season when cemeteries become homes for many families’ second Christmas tree, where devotion meets tinsel, “Let It Snow” garden ornaments and the occasional Santa swizzle stick.

A kind of populist yuletide ritual is flourishing far from front yards, transforming the graves of loved ones into festive tableaux. Like memorial walls and the spontaneous shrines that appeared in Union Square in Manhattan after 9/11, displays in scores of cemeteries are at once intimate and public, their sheer exuberance often posing challenges for cemetery officials who find themselves issuing decorating regulations and occasionally enacting crackdowns on “nonconforming” grave décor.

This week, members of the Bailey family gathered, as they do every year, at the Holy Cross Cemetery and Mortuary here, better known as the final resting place of Bing Crosby, Bela Lugosi, Rita Hayworth and other Hollywood luminaries. Bearing a flotilla of evergreens, ornaments, guavas and oranges and carrying paper-cup offerings of tequila, coffee and cigarettes, they decorated the unadorned markers of their departed. Among them is Clarence Joseph Bailey, a tequila aficionado who died two years ago, at age 34, of diabetes.

With tiny white picket fences and garlands that glint in the sun, they fashioned an extension of their Christmas.

“The shopping, the dinners, the parties — you escape all that,” said Trina Bailey, 37, Mr. Bailey’s sister. “It’s comforting. There is a sense of calm. You forget the living world.”

At the three cemeteries run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, Christmas decorating is now officially limited to flowers placed in a maximum of two urns and potted evergreens no more than 12 inches high, with weekly sweeps on offending Santa Claus blankets, Styrofoam candy canes and the like.

“Decorations can be an impediment to backhoes, and there are liability issues in tripping over candy canes,” said Kathy Atkinson, the director of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. “People understand this with their head,” she added. “But with their heart they need to do something.”

Though the tradition of decorating ancestors’ graves is an ancient one, most commonly associated in the United States with El Dia de los Muertos, or the Mexican and Latin American Catholic folk tradition of The Day of the Dead, the ritual is gaining a broader embrace.

From the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, where many people of Czech descent are buried, to San Fernando Cemetery II in San Antonio, and Asian cemeteries of Orange County, the decorations are so elaborate that they are being studied by folklorists.

“The grave has become the extension of the living room,” said Helen Sclair, a cemetery historian in Chicago. “If people decorate, they decorate. There seems to be no stop to it.”

In Culver City from Dec. 14 through Jan. 9, the official window for holiday decorating, the normally staid landscape of Holy Cross, one of 11 Catholic cemeteries run by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, becomes a glittering tribute to family creativity and loss. Many of the displays offer a collective act of devotion born from the unpredictability of life itself — car crashes, freak accidents, illnesses, murders, the incomprehensible sudden death of a child.

Milly Rodriguez spent four days decorating the grave of her daughter Vanessa, who died of cystic fibrosis last October at age 10, after a year in and out of Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Mrs. Rodriguez festooned her holiday tribute with Disney princess lights and a Cinderella doll as the star. During visits, she uses the cigarette lighter in her car as a power source to light up the tree. The display is proof to her daughter “that life is still out there,” she said.

Although lights are officially prohibited by the archdiocese — along with trees taller than two feet, battery and electrically operated equipment, anchoring spikes, easily breakable ornaments and standing Santa Clauses, Nutcracker figures, snowmen — the urge to create has snowballed, making enforcement difficult. As when suburbanites bicker over property lines, tension among families occasionally occurs when displays spill over to neighboring headstones.

“We want everyone to be able to honor their loved ones in a way that is respectful to the person but also to the people around them,” said Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese.

In Los Angeles, the combination of climate, immigration and cultural experimentation has made the city’s cemeteries something of an outdoor gallery at Christmastime. This is especially so in memorial parks, where acres of uniform flat stones “beg for personalization,” said Sandra Mizumoto Posey, a folklorist and assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona.

The seasonal proliferation also reflects a broader emotional acceptance of memorials in the culture, as symbolized by the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, said David Sloane, a professor of planning at the University of Southern California and the author of “The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

In Los Angeles, cultures sit side by side, gravesite-to-gravesite. At the Asian Garden of Peaceful Eternity, a section of Westminster Memorial Park in Orange County, for instance, Tran Hop, who was born in Vietnam, combines the Vietnamese graveside tradition of lighting incense with a Christmas tree powered by a solar battery.

“We decorate like Caucasians,” he explained rather proudly. “We have been here for a long time. We are very easy to adopt.”

Nevertheless, cemeteries are not immune from the more secular competitive zeal seen in neighborhoods where huge inflatable Santas and computerized light displays now subsume front yards.

“Someone pushes the boundary a little bit and then someone else tries to top it,” said Stephen M. Goldstein, who gives monthly tours of Los Angeles cemeteries for the Studio for Southern California History and founded the Web site beneathlosangeles.com. “Then it becomes a thing.”

When 20-year-old Herberth Hernandez was killed recently, his brother Martin noticed the decorations in the cemetery. He was inspired to go all out, with a rich garden brimming with garlands, flowers and Superman balloons. “I think about him while I’m doing the work,” Mr. Hernandez said.

Despite snowless ground, to enter the nondenominational Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, where Liberace, Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton lie, is to have no doubt that Christmas is near. Alicia Montés and her daughter Lyz, 15, prayed beside a fragile tableau of beaded garlands and home-made eggshell ornaments they created in honor of baby Ivan, Mrs. Montes’s first born, who died in childbirth 20 years ago.

Nearby, Bernadette Filosa, a 56-year-old retired court administrator, hauled a Christmas tree out of her Prius to her parents’ graves, though it appeared to exceed the regulation height of four feet. Her mother, Bernadetta, who lived to 91, never lost sight of own parents’ Italian traditions — they ran an Italian restaurant across from Desilu Studios.

Ms. Filosa said she had been baking her mother’s favorite chocolate cookie recipe, with raisins, jimmies, cloves and chocolate icing. They were cooling back home.

“I’m making your cookies, Ma,” she said out loud as she wrapped garlands around the tree from the Home Depot. “We’re still celebrating.”

From the The Gainesville Sun

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This man is Scott Field, owner of ViaVista Mapping, who is digitally mapping all of the marked and unmarked graves at the Brandon cemetery located along Sioux Boulevard. Field uses ground-penetrating radars (GPR) and GPS satellite systems to map both what’s above ground for what people can see, and what’s below ground where unknown, unmarked graves lie. 

“A lot of people don’t know about it and they don’t know they need us until they need us,” Field said. “We usually get a call after somebody’s gone out to try to bury somebody and they hit something and there’s a burial there.”

“There’s also a lot of cemeteries out there that they’re finally figuring out that one person apparently knows where everybody is at and that person is 85 years old and he’s in the hospital and they’re scared to death, that’s when we’ll get a call,” he said. 

Glenn Thiele, the cemetery sexton, was visiting the cemetery last summer with his daughter who studies genealogy. As the two walked through the graves, they noticed that there were many unmarked graves they wanted to identify and locate.

“We were trying to figure out where things are at, how the cemetery was laid out and what the natural progression was,” he said. “After we started looking at headstones, we realized some of them don’t have stones and some of them are not in the church records at all.”

Thiele consulted Jerry Dahlin, the former sexton, for the cemetery records and quickly found out that the records kept over the centuries were not sufficiently preserving the history of the graves. 

“I wanted to figure out what is actually out here and others had mentioned in the past that they wanted to find out as well,” Thiele said. “We are trying to figure out if there is somebody in the ones that are marked, for the ones that don’t have stones, is there something there? We can probe the ground to see if there’s something down there, but that’s not always real accurate.”

Thiele enlisted Field’s help and now, Field will continue his work at the cemetery throughout this week mapping the graves. He uses satellites to map the above-ground view where the head and footstones lie and a GPR to scan underground and highlight abnormalities, which indicate a grave. 

The data Field collects is then transferred into a digital, interactive map of the cemetery that can be accessed on ViaVista’s website. An overhead view of the cemetery shows every grave, a photo of the headstone, who is buried there, whether the plot is open or if there is an unmarked body. 

“I will go to the center of every burial I’ve found and take a GPS point and take a picture of the person that’s in that carrier,” Field said. “For the unmarked graves, I’ll take a GPS point saying ‘hey, this is an unmarked burial,’ Now all that information will get put in the cloud and post-processing will take that and make a map.”

Field said he just completed a job in Victoria, Texas where he located a mass burial for enslaved people using his GPR technology. The cemetery owners knew the burial site existed but didn’t know the exact location and asked ViaVista to help. 

Thiele said a QR code will be available at the cemetery entrance for people to scan and look up the exact location and plot number of their loved ones. This feature and Brandon’s cemetery map will be ready to use on ViaVista’s website in September. 

Not only can Field’s technology track the current grave sites, but it can also mark the plot of land west of the cemetery that Thiele said will be for new graves in the coming generations. Since Field will have all the data collected on the area, once new graves are put into the plots, Field can add their information to the website without remapping the area. 

In 2018, Field and his wife Christina retired from their corporate jobs and sold their house and all their belongings to buy an RV and travel the country. Six months later, Field got bored and they bought ViaVista Mapping and started booking cemeteries along their journey. They have done three cemeteries in Howard and one in Colman.

“I’ve been traveling all across the United States and mapping cemeteries. We go to little towns like this with amazing people. You meet your Lynn and your Bubba and your Jerry. You’re helping them and that’s what we like to do is help people. We’re providing a good service,” Field said.  

Christina said the on site field collection will be completed by Thursday.

Dahlin noted the importance of the preservation of the cemetery’s history and the growing population of Brandon as why they decided to have the cemetery digitally mapped.

“We’ve got to be organized,” he said. “We’ve got 11,000 people now and a lot of them will probably be buried here and this is where they’re going to call home. … A cemetery is for the people that come back to the community and want to find loved ones so that’s why we’re doing this.”

Cemetery mapping news from the Brandon Valley Journal

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The process of creating a digital burial plot map enables cemetery operators to understand the composition of those interred at the cemetery. Much can be learned by analyzing the data of the cemetery demographics. For this cemetery, our cemetery mapping process resulted in documenting the presence of 145 veterans and 11 individuals who lived to 100 years of age and beyond!

The cemetery’s existing burial plot map consisted of a collection of hand-written information entered into a paper block grid, along with a hard-copy roster and an entry in the USGenWeb Archives. By conducting ground penetrating radar scans of the cemetery, collecting GIS data, and developing an ArcGIS cemetery mapping application, we provided our client with a dynamic, user-friendly WebMap cemetery map along with professional, cartographic, large-format print files.

In addition to being an important historic landmark, the Glencoe Geiger cemetery serves as a home for threatened protected species, including the gopher tortoise and sandhill cranes.

Contact the ViaVista Mapping experts today to learn more about the costs associated with our mapping services and get a free estimate for your project.

Learn more about preserving African-American historic places HERE. Get more resources for preserving a historic cemetery HERE. You can learn more about what variables are considered when determining the cost of a cemetery mapping project HERE.

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