GIS Mapping Services

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Ashland Township Cemetery Map

Ashland Township, located in Newaygo County, has three cemeteries that are maintained by the Township Clerk’s Office. They were looking for a new way to manage the cemeteries instead of photocopied drafts and drawings of the cemetery layouts. The copies were large and heavily marked and edited and difficult for the public to access and use. Ashland Township contacted WMSRDC’s GIS department to look into a solution to their problem. With the paper maps and spreadsheet data provided by the township, WMSRDC was able to digitally map the cemetery sections, plots, roads, and pictures of statues and headstones. Once the data from the clerk’s office was associated with the digital spacial data, the maps were posted online for public use by the Muskegon County GIS Department. Using this online platform, not only can the public search the cemeteries for specific names, they can see the exact locations of graves within the cemeteries, birth and death dates, and photos of the headstones. The Clerk’s office can also log into the online platform and maintain and edit the data as needed. The Ashland Township Cemetery Viewer is available here.