Long-term projects for the website are continuing. The project to reconstruct the relational database is progressing slowly as time permits. The project to link NHOGA's website to Find a Grave is also progressing. The third project is to update the HTML styling information to use modern stylesheets. A NHOGA stylesheet is now available, but hand editing is required to replace the hard-coded styling in the pages with stylesheet references.

Until around 2012 NHOGA's data holdings were maintained in a relational database. The web pages were generated automatically from the database. More recently, updates to the data have been hand edited directly in the web pages. As a result the relational database is significantly out of date. Having the information in a relational format greatly simplifies the task of maintaining it and makes the webmaster's job much easier. So I began a project to bring the relational database up to date with any new information that has been collected in the last ten years.

This project consists of two parts: parsing the existing web pages to extract the data portion from the formatting and moving the data into the relational structure. The parsing phase is complicated by the fact that we have not been consistent in how we constructed the web pages. A significant amount of hand editing of the pages has been necessary to get them in a consistent format. This is what is taking the time.

The data phase also has some issues. The current relational database is in an obsolete version of Microsoft Access. Some of the data fields are too small to contain the needed information. There are new fields that need to be added. I feel the best solution is to replace the database software. There are a number of relational database platforms available. I am currently surveying the choices to see which platform would best meet our needs. Some of the alternatives allow for data storage in the Cloud which would make it more accessible. Any final decision will be left up to the Board.

I have long felt the need for the website to have town maps that showed the location of all of the cemeteries in the the town. Google Maps had the data to produce the maps but their Terms of Service specifically forbid using it to produce the maps I wanted. Recently I found very similar data on Open Street Map, which is completely free to use. So we now have map pages for each town. You can use the maps for navigation as well, There is a top level map of the entire state with push-pins for the counties. Clicking on the pin for a county brings up a county map with pins for each town. Clicking on the town pin brings up the town map for that town. Clicking on a cemetery pin takes you to the cemetery map that we had previously.

A secondary benefit from the Open Street Map data is that it allows us to identify those cemeteries where our location coordinates are not actually within the town boundaries. We had coordinates for one site that placed the location in Connecticut! A couple were offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. However many of these sites are very near a town line and our coordinates place the site just over the line.

This brings up the subject of the "red" sites. Anyone who has used our website extensively has seen cemeteries that are displayed with a red background on the town pages. I try to clean up any of these when I work on a town page. I have found that only around 40% have wrong coordinates and a majority of these are simple typographical errors that are easy to spot and fix. Many others are because the name of the road is different rather than the coordinates being wrong. There are multiple reasons why the name might not agree.

Most of our coordinates were obtained by locating the site on a tax map or USGS quadrangle. The accuracy of the coordinates varied with the quality of the map. GPS was not available. I have found one good way to obtain actual GPS coordinates is by taking a photo. Most cell phone or tablet devices are equipped with GPS in addition to a camera. If you turn on "Location Tags" in your camera settings and then take a photo, the GPS location will be inserted into the photo. You can then view the coordinates if you copy the photo to a Windows laptop.

Be aware that having GPS coordinates in photos can be a security risk. If you take photos where the location would compromise anyone's privacy, be sure the Location Tags feature is turned off before taking the picture.

Clark Bagnall
Webmaster