City of Cle Elum Cemetery Web Project

The City of Cle Elum in Kittitas County, Washington, is small, with a population of just 1,872 at the 2010 census. About an hour and a half by car from Seattle, Cle Elum is a popular area for camping and outdoor activities.

The City of Cle Elum’s cemetery management information system was nonexistent. Instead, office staff had resorted to using printouts pinned to office walls, which were not easy to synchronize with the site records held at the cemetery. This approach also made information very difficult to find. Relying on paper records also left the system vulnerable to human error (such as misreading someone’s handwriting or duplicating entries between the record-keeping systems) and all the risks involved with storing important information saved on paper, such as vulnerability to natural disasters. Working with FLO through the Association of Washington Cities GIS Consortium, the City of Cle Elum moved from a handwritten paper cemetery management system to a user-friendly web map and web application that allows staff to easily track and manage all grave information from any device. 

Building on an existing (but out-of-date) GIS dataset and scanned paper records, FLO created a new GIS dataset to contain all the information available related to over 10,000 cemetery plots. Additional data verification was carried out using public sources and online tools, as well as local knowledge. The data, map, and web application were hosted and built in the City’s own ArcGIS Online account, to ensure that staff would have full ownership of the final web application. City staff can open the map to see information about plot availability, occupancy, and any restrictions that may apply. Because they can directly edit the data and update it to reflect new burials or additional information that may become available, the data is trusted and instantly available. The use of standardized data domains makes for faster data entry and reduces errors, and staff in the office or field can pull up the data and be confident that they are accessing the most current information. Furthermore, the information can be displayed in a public-facing version to allow people across the world to search for and find the graves of relatives and loved ones.