On a sunny May morning in Belmont Cemetery on Grove Street, birds cawed and sang. The American flags placed for Memorial Day dotted the landscape, along with verdant trees and colorful grave plantings. A motley collection of markers, from large jagged rocks and flush markers to traditional granite headstones, identified the many graves that have accumulated since the cemetery’s 1859 founding.
Belmont’s other public cemetery, Highland Meadow, opened on Concord Avenue in 2006 with a different aesthetic. It is adjacent to Lone Tree Hill conservation land, and only minimalist markers flush with the ground are allowed.
“It’s small, but it’s not that small when you’re wandering around trying to find someone [who’s buried there],” said Ellen O’Brien Cushman, chair of the Board of Cemetery Commissioners. “I think it can be frustrating for people, because it is all flat markers up there.”
The frustration of finding a grave at Belmont’s cemeteries could end soon, thanks to a grave-finder tool tentatively set to launch this year. The tool will be a new application of Belmont’s developing Geographic Information System (GIS) map and will arrive to support a burgeoning interest in genealogy and as municipalities seek ways to streamline operations.
The ease of finding a grave in Belmont matters: Each year, dozens of people contact the cemetery commissioners seeking information, according to Alexander Corbett III, a cemetery commissioner since 1994. The requests reflect Americans’ booming interest in genealogy.
According to a 2019 Pew Research study, the vast majority of the Americans who used mail-in DNA testing services such as Ancestry.com did so to learn their family origins. At the same time, Find a Grave has grown in popularity. The Ancestry-owned website and app allows people to map grave entries that include memorials, GPS locations, and photos. In 2013, Find a Grave had roughly 100 million memorials and 75 million photos. Thirteen years later, that catalog has expanded to 250 million. As Belmont’s GIS map grows and deepens, similar capabilities might soon be available via the town website.
Follow Your Phone
The roots of Belmont’s cemetery GIS go back to the early 2000s, when town staff began transferring information about every grave, handwritten on index cards, into what Chief Innovation Officer Christopher McClure called a “glorified database.” This meant that instead of pulling the cards from a vault and looking through them when someone needed information or wanted to find a grave, town employees could search the records digitally. That initial database software became obsolete, so the town contractor PeopleGIS migrated the information into its mapping software. That project was approved in 2021.
When McClure arrived in Belmont in 2024, he asked department heads about their priorities. For Department of Public Works Director Jay Marcotte, among his priorities was a GIS map of the town’s cemeteries. It’s something Marcotte had wanted since starting in his role 11 years ago. At a cemetery in Malden, Marcotte had seen how visitors could find a grave using their smart phones and an on-site QR code.
“And that’s where I want it to be,” Marcotte said of his hopes for Belmont’s cemetery GIS.
Cushman agreed.
“A really appealing thing is someone standing there with a phone that says, ‘You know, Uncle Joe Blanchard, where could he possibly be?’ And the number comes up and it tells you you’re within six feet of where you need to be.”
McClure, a GIS proponent who has spearheaded a government-wide GIS initiative in Belmont, was the right person to make it happen.
GIS is “connecting data with maps,” said Cy Smith, executive director of MassGIS, Massachusetts’ Bureau of Geographic Information. The lines, figures, addresses, and roads on a map all “have data in a database,” Smith said. Towns like Belmont share their data with MassGIS, which collects it all into a Google Maps-like application called MassMapper. MassMapper facilitates things like 911 responses, and towns can use it as a base for layering their local data.
Cleaning Belmont’s Robust Data
Belmont’s cemetery data is now being cleaned up for the second time. Going from paper to digital two decades ago, 1,800 lots had “mismatched” information, Cushman said.
“Someone had to go back and try to figure out how to match that stuff up, and that took a long, long, long time,” she said.
Belmont is lucky to have the robust data collected through its cemetery cards, said Robbyn Abbitt, associate director of the Geospatial Analysis Center at Miami University, in Ohio. Abbitt’s work with her students has included GIS mapping cemeteries.
“Not every cemetery has those,” she said.
Moving from database to GIS has meant migrating the information into the map. Alongside PeopleGIS and Schneider Geospatial, McClure and the town’s GIS coordinator, Jackie Newell, are working to improve the data as it is attached to the map. PeopleGIS made sure the plots were connected to a real spot on the map. At this point, McClure said, the data is good, and Newell is connecting it with the map so that when people search for a grave, the map directs them to the correct spot. Marcotte, the DPW director, estimates that the data is 95% accurate right now.
“We’re probably never going to be 100% accurate,” he said.
At some point, though, the information will be good enough for launch, with the idea of addressing issues as they arise.
The cemetery GIS is already live for town employees. Marcotte imagines using it not only to track lot sales and burials, but also for tasks such as mowing and repair schedules. He said Belmont’s GIS map, including the cemetery, could allow residents to find a lot of information online, rather than call the DPW about things such as pothole repairs and plot sales at Highland Meadow.
“That type of information would probably stave off 90% of my complaint phone calls,” Marcotte said. That matters at a time when municipalities are facing budget cuts.
“The good thing about GIS is that it allows [towns and cities] to operate more efficiently,” Smith, of MassGIS, said. “If they have good information, they’re able to do more with less overall.”
McClure anticipates launching a cemetery dashboard to the public before 2026 ends. The top priority is a tool that mimics Find A Grave, allowing anyone to search for someone buried in one of Belmont’s cemeteries.
Saying Their Names
At the March Board of Cemetery Commissioners meeting, members discussed the possible grave-documenting functions of a GIS. In an interview, Aleda Freeman, MassGIS web mapping services manager, described those functions well.
“You could have a GIS that not just records the plot boundaries and the name of the person, but make a photo of the stone, some history about the person, some history about how they’re important in the town history,” she said.
McClure said the cemetery commissioners and the town clerk’s office (Cushman is also town clerk) will ultimately decide which details to include about each gravesite and the person buried there.
“We want to make sure that we are providing what families need and want, and genealogists perhaps want and need … so that they can locate their loved ones there,” Cushman said.
With identity theft and fraud in mind, though, she’s not sure the town will provide “every single field that might be available.”
The cemetery dashboard could have other other features, including the ability to buy lots online. While McClure said he can’t promise specific functions, from an IT standpoint, the town could offer online burial lot transactions in a couple of years, especially if residents request that option.
“This stuff becomes almost sort of iterative,” he said. “People see things, and then they can sort of see the next step, and they sort of ask for more. So we’re hoping that some of this will be organic.”
The final step in making the cemetery GIS visual and accurate includes something low-tech. The hope is that people will photograph and capture the details of each grave at both cemeteries. Those will then be attached to corresponding grave points on the GIS map. Doing so will make the lots easier to find while creating what McClure calls a “cemetery experience.”
Cushman has wondered if the task might make a good Eagle Scout project, while McClure has talked about recruiting “senior tax volunteers.”
That shoe-leather task also differentiates cemetery GIS work from mapping a town’s sewer system or its trees, according to Abbitt, the Miami University GIS expert.
“The information that you gather from it is not just a list of cold, hard facts. It’s a list that is very human,” she said.
Typing the names as she records a grave gives her pause.
“When was the last time someone said your name?” she said. “We don’t know anything else, usually, about them, but that, to me, feels like a service — a very easy service, we can do for our local community, is just to say somebody’s name at least one more time.”