preliminary phases

Beginning in late October 2001, a small group of 7th grade Geographic Information Systems (GIS) students at Jenifer Junior High School (Lewiston ID), then studying ArcView (ESRI) with Steven Branting, began a comprehensive  survey of  Normal Hill Cemetery in an effort to visualize a possible pattern for the reburial of graves that were exhumed during 1889-1890, when the cemetery was moved to its present location. 

PHASE 1:

Normal Hill Cemetery contains more than 20,000 grave sites, all of which needed to be surveyed by the students.  A total of 128 sites met the criterion of having a date-of-death prior to 1889.   Using handheld GPS units, the students marked identified graves as waypoints, individually cataloguing and plotting them for merging into an ArcView map of the area using TIGER data shapefiles.   The students used the exercise as a means of  learn and practice how to download data, along with reprojections.

PHASE 2:

The new attribute table was constructed to allow for the data to be sorted into time "windows" and portrayed as separate themes.  This data was projected over a 61cm-resolution image especially captured for this project  by the QuickBird 2 satellite in June 2002.

The data demonstrated that a clear pattern of reburial was discernible, with the latest burials being the first to receive attention from those in charge of moving the graves.  At the time of this survey, it was not yet known that the first reburials were also from the original Masonic Cemetery.  The clustering of graves along the 14th Avenue corridor was best exemplified by graves dating from 1885-1888, shown above as yellow squares.

At this juncture, the reporting of these findings by way of the ESRI Community Atlas project earned the students the 2002 international award for GIS studies (q.v.)