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How do people lose track of cemeteries?
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As state archaeologist, Glenna Dean deals with any discoveries of the dead in the Land of Enchantment, and New Mexico's growth has been keeping her busy.
"As cities more intensely develop their infrastructure or go back and put in new infrastructure . . . that's when they're coming across dead people in coffins," she says. "It happens all the time.
"I'm just tired of it, to be honest. I just don't see any reason why people should lose track of a cemetery."
But people do lose track in as little as two or three generations, she says. Once that happens, the forgotten bodies underground are vulnerable to developers upending earth to make way for growth.
Earlier this year, she decided to do something about it: a project to find and describe every burial site in the state.
"Communities, when planning new roads or subdivisions, will know to look to this database to find out where cemeteries are or have been, so they don't find people in a coffin when they put in sewer lines," she said. "This is an effort to keep that from happening anymore."
The New Mexico Cemeteries and Burial Grounds Database would eventually be open to input from other people who gather information about burial sites, she said.
That would clear the way for assistance from people such as Cheryl Harris.
She leads a group of volunteers who transcribe tombstone inscriptions for publication on the Web. It's part of the US GenWeb Project, a nationwide, volunteer effort to provide Web sites for genealogical research.
Harris was one of many genealogists contacted by Eileen Camilli, president of Ebert and Associates, a consulting firm executing the state database project.
Because the volunteers are already investigating burial sites, they can often provide helpful information for the database, Camilli said.
The first phase of the project - which began in the spring - is to describe the status of burial sites that are known and have been mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey. That status information can include a site's location and whether or not people are still being buried in it. There are about 600 sites, Camilli said.
The effort to track down unknown burial sites would come later, though some information is already being gathered from volunteers such as Harris.
"There are a lot of loose ends here," Camilli said. "We have names and locations without a lot of information. We have other locations with more information, or more names with no locations."
Phase one of the project is scheduled to end June 2007. Dean said those results will be reviewed before deciding what to do next.
