Application for Montana Land Grant signed by commissioners

SUPERIOR – A grant has become available through the state for counties who map local cemeteries. The way of getting these funds was discussed over several meetings of the Mineral County Commissioners.

Tim Read, county planner and sanitarian, informed the commissioners of the Montana Land Grant. The grant is part of an effort to collect information about different areas for public record. Part of this includes mapping cemeteries and recording who is buried where.

Read compared it to the website findagrave.com, where people can look up where someone is buried and find public information about them. He said approximately 85 percent of the headstones in the Superior cemetery were on the site.

“There’s not a set way to make that generally available to the public,” said Read. “This would be a mechanism to take the approximately 1,600 grave locations in the county and [record the locations and names].”

The grant money could be accessed by Geographic Information System projects. These are projects, which use a variety of tools to study information through geographic sources. GIS projects allow people to analyze and share the information quickly.

The grant money comes from a fee added to transactions at the clerk and recorder office. These include transactions for ownership records, voter registration, elections and other transactions. The fees get pooled together and saved in Helena to be used by the counties through various sources.

The project would use a system the county already has. Read said the mapping system is the same one the county already uses for addressing. The cemetery mapping would be an addition to the program. This would make the information available to the districts and could easily be expanded to make it available to the public at large.

“I sent a letter to Guna (librarian at the Superior branch), because it’s something that could be in the library if we can fit in the space…put the software on there,” said Read.

Kay Strombo, from the Mineral County Museum in Superior, has already compiled a list of gravesite locations around the county.

The mapping would be done by setting a GPS over each gravesite so it marks the location. From there, information can be downloaded to the database and accessed over the Internet. Read also suggested adding a link to the county homepage to take people to the database.

Not everyone was supportive of the idea. Kevin Donally, a Superior resident, did not like the idea of the grant money going to someone outside the county. Read confirmed there were no contractors who could do the job in the county and someone would have to be brought in.

Donally felt the money should be given to a local company so it could benefit the residents instead of going to someone from Missoula or elsewhere.

“Is it going to benefit this county?” asked Donally. “Or is it going to be someone from Missoula comes out for four hours [to] GPS all the grave sites, takes the money and goes back to Missoula. If it’s not going to benefit us directly…I don’t see a reason to do it.”

It was Donally’s opinion the money should be saved and the project held until there was a contractor in Mineral County who could do the job. However, Read explained it was extremely unlikely there would ever be a contractor in Mineral County who would do the work.

“They have to work out of big population places,” said Read. “The contractor that I work with here has nine counties he works with in Montana. There are very few of them out there that have this capability.”

Donally said most people in the county knew where all the cemeteries were and there would be little benefit to residents in having them mapped. However, Read pointed out there were other uses for the information outside the county.

He explained the counties who have already taken on this project have already discovered something interesting. Genealogists and people from other countries have called specifically to ask about information on names or gravesites.

“It seems like a worthwhile project,” said Read.

Someone from Norway would not know anything about the gravesites in Mineral County. The database the project would create would give them something to search through and find the information they needed without much difficulty.

The mapping project would cost approximately $16,000. This would be covered by $12,000 from the grant and approximately $4,000 provided by the office of the County Planner.

According to Read, the big motivation for this project is to get information about the various graves out to the public. This project would pull copies of all these records together and make a database people could access when they wanted to look something up.

“Eventually [we’ll] have a workstation in the library or somewhere with a tutorial that you can sit down and research this stuff,” said Read.

Roman Zylawy, county commissioner of the east end, signed the grant application.

Among the discussions of cemeteries, an update on access to one graveyard was presented to the commissioners. Read recently sent a letter regarding a piece of property dedicated to the Quartz Cemetery.

Part of the cemetery crossed into private property. This area has approximately 47 people resting in it.

Read said a right of way easement was never issued and there is no way to get to the property. An agreement would need to be reached with the landowners to allow people to enter the property to visit or care for the graves.

However, a solution was reached as a subdivision was recently established where a 60-foot easement was formalized with protective rules for what needed to be done to care for the area. This would allow people to enter the 60 foot area of the property without it being considered trespassing.