Finding a gravesite of an ancestor or friend can be a daunting task. Old maps do not take into account the rolling nature of the landscape. Every gravesite appeared to be in vertical and horizontal alignment and in regular sizes. But they're not.

At Crawford Cemetery, however, new detailed mapping and records are accurate. People can be found.

"I can tell you exactly where they are. We have never had a map of the whole cemetery with all the gravestones plotted exactly where they are," Dick Moore said. Moore serves on the cemetery board with president Ann Linman and Hetty Todd. All three helped with the project.

All the burial sites were exactly located using GPS satellite technology. Moore walked through the entire cemetery writing down names, date of birth, date of death, lot number and the section a person is buried in.

If someone is looking for a specific person, they will know right where to locate the gravesite.

"When they first started burying people out here, all these lots got . . . all messed up," Moore said. What resulted from doing the new mapping is the discovery of big spaces that can be sold as lots. "By re-surveying, we found a lot more room in the cemetery that we didn't know existed. That was one of the real plusses."

Moore has compiled interesting statistics about those buried in the cemetery, such as the fact that 56 people were born before 1850. That Anna Reed had the earliest birth date of those buried there. She was born in 1802 and died in 1887. Folklore has the first burial as being Dick Wilson in 1890 but two death dates precede Wilson — Reed in 1887 and Fluke in 1889. There are about 3,000 people buried in the Crawford Cemetery. Moore compiled the family names that have the most buried there — Collins 31, Cotten 21, Dove 21 and Filener 20. The average age of death is 65. "If you were born before 1850, the average age of death was higher," Moore said.

"Eventually I would like to have a website where you would click on a headstone and not only would it give the [name], but a picture of the tombstone and a short biography or obituary," Moore said. "Whether we ever get there, I don't know. But what I'm planning on doing is having a complete set of maps and the listing at the [Crawford] library." Moore developed computer records and maps that will be easy to keep updated.

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