I hesitate to actually type this, but I could be finished soon. I did what I think is the last section with a lot of the older burials (<1920) in it, and the remaining areas seem to have mostly later ones. Leastways, it took me an hour and a half for each section the last few days and they were fairly large areas. I’d actually planned it that way, do the old sections first and work my way up to the newer ones with fewer old burials. Partly that was due to logistics: I wanted to really get the old ones done in case something came up and I couldn’t finish the whole place, but I also wanted the easy parts for the end.
Thus far I’ve done 1108 full recordings of monuments. That includes a significant number of modern ones — put in place in the 1970s and later for pre-1920 burials — but I stopped doing those since I was mainly interested in fully recording at-risk monuments. For a while now, I’ve just fully recorded those and just collected some minor demographic data (sex and age data) for the non-at-risk ones. I’m going to try to get them all done in the next several days, which is possible. And then. . .well, I’m away for a couple of weeks, so nothing. But then will come data cleanup, no doubt revisiting some to get anything I missed or mis-entered, and thence on to working up something to publish! I hope to get at least one paper on the demographics and mortality profile, especially the evidence for the 1918 influenza pandemic — I might try JAMA for that, they have a small section on historical items that they publish. Hopefully also one in a historical archaeology journal as well. And then adding several pages to my web site describing the process in some detail so that others can learn from my experiences.
But the end, as they say, is in sight. . . .
UPDATE: And. . .I’m spent. Finished up at about 10:30 this morning. There’s one small section I didn’t do, which should have no <1920 burials in it, though I may end up doing that section anyway, just to be complete. Otherwise, that’s it except for going back to fix any errors. I started this Oct. 13 2009 so an almost 3 year project. Over 1100 monuments fully surveyed and probably as many partially done.
Now the data crunching begins. . . .
