The Westwood Cemetery Project
Our project to transcribe all the data on every tombstone in Oberlin's historic Westwood Cemetery into a database was initiated by Pat Murphy, Executive Director, when she asked for volunteers in 1998. Owned and operated by the City of Oberlin, Westwood, which contains about 8,700 burials, is the only cemetery in Oberlin. So far, we have coded data on about 7,000 markers, including family stones, headstones, mausoleums, and a few carriage stones (to step upon when leaving your carriage). Volunteers currently working on the project include Judy Connolly, Sally Kerr and Alan Gage.
Our first stop was the Association for Gravestone Studies, organized to "bring together those who have an interest in the study and preservation of historic gravemarkers." The association provided us with our initial data codes, as well as an initial computer program to record our transcribed data from Westwood.
We soon tailored the data codes to our needs and developed our own database. By November 2001 we had transcribed data on almost all of the markers and were entering them into our database. In the next few years, we expect, the database will be accessible online via the Oberlin Heritage Center's website. As time and resources permit, photographs of markers will be linked to the database.
About 75 percent of the graves in Westwood have markers of some type. As a supplement to the project we added to our database all of the burials in Westwood that are without markers. Thus anyone will be able to enter a name, and if the person was buried in Westwood all of the available data on that person will appear: birth, death, inscriptions, size of marker, veteran (y/n), owner of burial lot, etc.
--Alan Gage
A guide of Westwood Cemetery is available online or at the Oberlin Heritage Center's museum store.