Boy Scout Troop 55 in New Orleans, Louisiana used Magpi in their project to create a database of U.S. veteran headstones and graves to be cleaned and rehabilitated at Holt cemetery. Holt is one of the few places in New Orleans where people are buried below ground so it is difficult to keep clean because it floods when it rains.
One of the challenges faced by Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) volunteers at post 8973 in New Orleans is that there is no map or registry for Holt cemetery to indicate who is buried where and it takes a lot of time to go through the cemetery to find the veterans’ graves.
The database created for this project had only a few fields: section, row, plot, name of deceased, war in which served, rank, dates born/died, and fields for a photo of the entire plot and a close-up of the headstone. The ability to take and link photos in Magpi meant that variables needed to describe the “condition” of the plots and headstones did not have to developed.
Magpi greatly facilitate the VFW’s work in cleaning the headstones and also help them estimate how much money had to be raised – or material donated – to complete the rehabilitation over the next couple of years.
“If I had not used Magpi, my project would have been a lot more difficult and taken a lot more time. I think I would have had to choose a different, simpler project to help me earn my Eagle Scout rank”.
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