When I promise people that I will do something or other "this winter," this is the kind of day I have in mind. Socked in by ice and fog on Presidents Day, not willing to drive through it to a meeting, I've finally gotten around to setting up a database web interface for the town's cemeteries. There's a search page for the general public, and an administrative page for updating info. Some great old names: Thankful Abbott, Happy Kelley, Hezekiah Stevens.
As a programmer I have two basic goals, one: to get to a better class of errors than the one I just had, and two: to create tools for other people to do work rather than doing the work myself. I'm writing this cemetery thing in PHP and MySql, two free and widely available tools. Wednesday, I'll meet with some Historical Society people and some students at the college. The students will take photos of every tombstone in each of the 7 cemeteries and those will be part of the display. I'm not into genealogy; it's about data. I wish more of the story of each person was somehow saved. Unity has been a town since 1804, so there are more dead people (about 2500) than there are live ones (about 1800).
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