Douglas County Cemeteries for Google Earth
With the return of the Cemetery Preservation Committee comes an interactive resource that plots almost every cemetery known in Douglas County using Google Earth via Losing Georgia. For over a month I have extracted data from multiple sources – Douglas County Online Cemetery Database, the original cemetery map, land parcels and the Douglas County Cemetery Master List – and compiled the information for easy accessibility.
A total of 111 of a possible 116 cemeteries are available for viewing and are listed in alphabetical order in the sidebar. Information provided includes cemetery name, parcel #, land lot, district, section, and number of graves. The best feature tour is that every cemetery, with the exception of a few, has been located by the Cemetery Preservation Committee using GPS and plotted in Google Earth.
Other special features include a picture of the cemetery, link to the cemetery database entry, and more photos for viewing in Losing Georgia’s Flickr photo collection of Douglas County cemeteries. Google Earth will also create driving directions to a particular cemetery. All that has to be done is click on the Directions tab under Search, fill in the “from” text box, click on a cemetery to display its contents and click the “to here” link in the bottom left corner.
Another feature from Google Earth is when a placemark or folder is printed out, a screenshot of the aerial photo and the contents within each placemark are included. This then allows an easy way to have a paper copy of each cemetery on file for quick reference (preferably in the field) without the hassle of recreating the work in a word processor.
The Douglas County GIS Department is currently developing and will release a public map with every cemetery located by GPS. Thereafter cemetery information can be compared to any data in the county’s GIS database, something that has not been available. The Cemetery Preservation Commission plans to have all cemeteries documented with GPS by this summer.
This latest Google Earth tour from Losing Georgia will be added to the Interactive Tour so that data can be compared to documented new developments and historical resources. Other cemetery commissions that are interested in my Google Earth work can contact me via e-mail.
