Mapping Hometown History

Mapping Hometown History

Pam Goffinet has an unusual job that’s part detective, part historian, and part cartographer. She also does it in an unusual setting—cemeteries.

She got her start 10 years ago, when desperate church members approached her college geography professor looking for help. It seems the original—and only—map for Old Union Cemetery in Townsend, Del., (pop. 346) had been kept by an elderly church member under her bed. When she died, her heirs cleared out the house, and the cemetery records went into the trash.

“Even today, cemeteries in small towns and farming communities are managed by volunteers. Each person has his own system, note cards or lists or whatever. When someone passes away, that information can be lost,” explains the Rev. Carol Gallagher, bishop suffragan in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia. Gallagher was rector of St. Anne’s Church in Middletown, Del., (pop. 6,161) when Goffinet mapped that nearly 300-year-old cemetery.

“The new maps and computerized records (provided by Goffinet) enable us to provide a complete and caring service for people at a difficult time,” Gallagher adds.

Cemetery maps are invaluable to genealogists. They are a practical necessity for an undertaker planning a funeral and a church selling burial plots. It’s not unheard of for the same burial plot to be sold by mistake to two people. “That can be more than embarrassing; it can be a real problem,” Goffinet says.

Mapping a cemetery can be as straightforward as recording the locations of burial plots or as elaborate as detailing the writing on every tombstone, as Goffinet did for St. Philip of Neri Cemetery in Westport, N.Y., (pop. 1,362) and St. Stephen’s Cemetery in Earlville, Md. (pop. 50). She usually works from ripped, fading maps and incomplete deed records scattered in filing cabinets. Often, extensive unwritten information resides only in people’s memories.

“We were able to gather some records from a funeral parlor and the board’s old meeting minutes,” says Corbit Collins, treasurer of the board of Old Union Cemetery, where burials took place from the early 1700s until the 1940s. “But with our original map gone, we had very little information to go on.”

Goffinet, 49, and a resident of Rising Sun, Md., (pop. 1,702) has a bachelor’s degree in art anthropology and took additional classes in cartography. The pleasure she takes in her work is evident in her enthusiasm when she describes it. “I love to read the old stones and learn the fascinating stories that go along with the cemetery and the town’s history,” Goffinet says.

“There was one old, worn gravestone at Old Union Cemetery that was written completely in German,” she says. “I knew if I didn’t translate and record that information now, it would be lost forever.”

Deciphering the engraving on centuries-old grave markers can be a challenge. Time wears the engraving nearly smooth, and the characters that remain frequently are covered with lichens and obscured by stone discoloration. Goffinet has a simple trick: She sprays shaving cream on the stone, then wipes it with a window squeegee. The shaving cream fills in the indentations, making the words visible again.

“I had never before met someone who attempted to map cemeteries. Pam is unique in her expertise,” says Robbie Hutchison, owner of Daniels and Hutchison Funeral Home in Middletown. He serves on the board of several central Delaware cemeteries that Goffinet has mapped.

Goffinet creates new, grid-marked maps and gives copies to several members of the cemetery’s volunteer board to help ensure their survival. Information is also stored on computer, making it accessible by family name, plot number, and location. In addition, Goffinet creates notebooks cross-referencing burial information by last name and plot number and includes copies of the maps. Local libraries and historical societies often buy the books to help preserve the town’s history.

“It gives me great satisfaction,” she says, “to make sure these people are not lost, that a record of their existence survives.”

Theresa Medoff writes from her home in Wilmington, Del.

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