Why College Students Are Digitizing Graveyards

What happens when you ask 50 college students to map 6,000 headstones using nothing but smartphones and drone imagery? You might expect complaints about tedious data entry. Instead, something unexpected emerged: students discovered they were living among the stories of their community's past.

This wasn't supposed to be about connection or meaning. It started as a practical problem in Oxford, Ohio, when the local cemetery association dissolved in 2020, leaving the city responsible for a 40-acre historic cemetery with only paper maps and stacks of burial cards.

When Paper Records Meet Digital Reality

Robbyn Abbitt, who runs Miami University's Geospatial Analysis Center, had been pairing her classes with local mapping projects for years. Small cemetery projects gave students field experience while serving community needs. But this was different—a massive cemetery with virtually no digital records.

Traditional mapping methods would've been brutal. Walk to each headstone with GPS units, photograph it, write down information by hand, then combine everything back in the office. 10-15 minutes per headstone. For a 300-headstone cemetery, that's 60 hours of work.

But geospatial technology had evolved dramatically over the past decade. Smartphones replaced handheld GPS units. Cloud storage eliminated local servers. Drones captured high-resolution aerial imagery that revealed individual headstones with startling clarity.

Flipping the Script on Cemetery Mapping

Abbitt's team tried something radical: work backwards from the sky down. Using drone imagery captured by the city of Oxford, students could see every headstone clearly from above. In the classroom, they divided the cemetery into sections and placed digital dots on each visible headstone.

Then came the field work—but transformed. Instead of fumbling with GPS coordinates and notebooks, students simply walked to their assigned headstones, snapped photos, and attached them to the dots they'd already placed.

The results spoke for themselves: 5,000+ headstones documenting over 6,000 individuals, completed in just 600 hours—half the time traditional methods would've required.

The Unexpected Discovery: Community Connection

But efficiency wasn't the real story. As students worked through the data, they began recognizing names. The campus buildings they walked past daily? Named after people buried in this cemetery. The streets they lived on? Same story.

They discovered Miami University had its own special section for faculty and staff. They found "Babyland," where McCullough-Hyde Hospital provides burial for infants lost during childbirth. Most remarkably, they uncovered 400+ military veterans, including four from the Revolutionary War.

Students reported feeling more connected to both the university and Oxford community after the project. Many continued researching the family names they'd encountered, diving deeper into local history on their own time.

Technology as Community Builder

This project reveals something counterintuitive about our digital age. While technology often gets blamed for disconnecting us from place and community, here it did the opposite. Smartphones and drones became tools for historical discovery and community connection.

The city of Oxford now maintains a searchable web application where families can find loved ones by name or location. But the real impact may be on the students who spent months saying names that had been "lost to time," as Abbitt puts it.