Documenting Monuments: Part II

View of the valley to the south of the Church.
A beautiful fog had rolled over it in the middle of the day.

Due to the help of a friend, I was able to completely finish documenting all of the Victorian Era monuments at St. Stephen's this last Thursday. It really is amazing how much more gets done with the help of another person! I am incredibly thankful for my friend's help, and she did a wonderful job copying down information and cleaning monuments! The day was once again lovely, and halfway through it fog rolled over the valley and into the cemetery. It made for an amazing view.

On Wednesday night I looked through a copy of a paper database given to me by the Old Cemeteries Society stating which burials had monuments and wrote down all the Victorian Era plot numbers that had one. It totalled approximately 52 monuments, but some of these burials did not have any monuments when I went to record them. Whether they originally did when the database was created or an entry mistake occurred I have no idea. A preliminary count of all the monuments recorded has shown that there are approximately 54 Victorian Era monuments in the cemetery. This number will be confirmed once I have completed the database. At the end of the day, I spent a couple of extra hours walking through the rows of monuments to ensure I had not missed any. During monument recording I have been utilising a paper database given to me by the Church to cross-check which person is buried in which plot and a few discrepancies have come up. For example, the database states that David Grieg is buried in plot 44, but when matching monument location with plot location on the map, it seems more likely that John Grieg is buried in this plot. Next Thursday I plan to check burial registers to clear up the confusion. It is possible ground shift has made this difficult to discern.

The Harrison plot. All that remains is a concrete boundary. I am
not sure if monuments for these three burials ever existed, but and
OCSV paper database printed in 1997 says there should be a "stone"
for each burial. Maybe it means the boundary?

Now that documenting is complete, the long process of entering all of the information into my Access database begins. I plan on formatting the database into a more accessible version by transferring the information into a form template. I am not entirely sure how I will be doing this yet, but Youtube videos have thus far been my friend. I then need to create a map with all of the photos I took. I have discovered that my computer does not have nearly enough memory to support the software needed to convert my photos to 3D digital files. A minimum of 16 GB of memory and a 3.5 GHz processing speed are required and my little netbook only has 4 GB of memory and a 1 GHz processor. Not nearly enough! I unfortunately do not know anyone who has this amount of memory on their computer either. So, sadly, that aspect had to be dropped. But overall, progress has been steady and few difficulties have been encountered. Hopefully the rest of the project continues to go as smoothly!