Tioga County Grave Mapping Project

The Tioga County Grave Mapping project is a multi-faceted project being led by the Mansfield University Geo-sciences Department and is hosted on their MU Earthlab site. The goal of this project is to create an online, searchable database of cemetery and grave locations in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, for public use.

This project includes using GIS for mapping and creating high resolution map applications, as well as using imagery collected from UAVs, for each of the 273 known cemetery locations in the county. The high resolution maps can then be used to map the currently known grave locations, as well as locations of possible unknown or clandestine graves.

Another important aspect of this project is the use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Software programs such as GPR Slice to search for and map locations of potential clandestine grave locations. This was conducted at the Brookside Cemetery located near Rexford, PA.

The mapping applications can also be used by families or genealogists to learn more about their relatives buried in the county. This will also provide local veteran organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and American Legion the ability to view maps of veteran’s graves. They would be able to use this information to place flags at all veterans graves for memorial day.