Thoughts on a cemetery database

     Databases can be really helpful to researchers because all of the information is in one place and you can link multiple bits of information to one grave. When you search for one grave all of the information about it comes up, you can also look for a particular bit of information and all of the graves that have it will be brought up. You can do many kind of analysis using a database if the information is provided. Some things include studying how many people are at a cemetery, the style of grave stones over time, the age individuals died, how individuals died and what the grave stones can tell us that the remains cannot. However you have to make sure all the categories in the database are in their proper format, for example in the database we were using the first age of individuals column was number based so it was able to be sorted numerically but all of the other age categories were in text format so even though numbers were recorded they had to be sorted alphabetically meaning all of the 100 year olds were grouped with numbers starting with one, giving a false reading of the oldest individual. Another thing to make sure about is that all of the spelling is the same, otherwise when you search a specific word some things may be missed. One thing I noticed with the database we used was that a lot of unknowns were left blank which was acceptable, because there are always going to be unknowns or missing data, but some were listed as “zzz” so when you were looking for ones with no information, these didn’t show up, which is a problem. Recording exactly what is written on the gravestones is good for the researcher and for preservation purposes, but it can make doing research on it very hard. Since each inscription is created personally, they are all very different and individualized, which makes comparisons and visualizing trends very difficult. It can also make it hard to tell who’s really in the grave as many parents burying their children will inscribe “our baby” when they are really a few years old. Where as when coming from a scientific perspective, baby usually means less than one years old, so when you search for the term you get a variety of results. Quantitative analysis allows you to be able to chart and graph information to see connections and how things change over time. It can mathematically prove links between ages and years of death, if there are spikes in deaths occurring for a period of time it can indicate the effects of illnesses or diseases occurring  or if there is an increase in the number of years people live it can show the affects of advances in medicine.  However you must make sure that when you use a final number found from your analysis that you give the context it came from or the total number of individuals that number comes from, otherwise the number you give has little meaning and has the potential to diminish your argument if the audience does not understand where the data is coming from.