WESTBROOK – Westbrook is launching a new database on the people buried in city’s three main cemeteries, possibly the only such program in Maine.

WESTBROOK – For the past six years, Teresa Mead has been slowly, painstakingly inputting information from thousands of Westbrook city documents.

Soon, the public will be able to access the results.

Mead is creating a new database on the people buried in Westbrook’s three main cemeteries. It could possibly be the only city in Maine to create such a database.

The new system, called CIMS, will allow the public to search for anyone buried in the three main Westbrook cemeteries and see any public information provided about that person on the death cards and obituaries kept in the Public Works department’s files, some of which date back to the late 1700s.

“I don’t know even how to gauge it. It takes a lot of time to look up. This will save a lot of time,” Mead said.

The new system is operational, although Mead, the administrative assistant for the Public Works department, and a few others in the department are the only ones with access to it. The system will launch through the city website in the next week or two, starting with information on Woodlawn and Highland Lakes cemeteries.

Other city employees are already seeing the time benefits to the new system, like Doug Eaton, operations supervisor, who used to have to physically walk around the cemeteries sometimes to look for a grave.

Besides saving countless hours, the new system has already helped people looking for lost family.

“There was a guy who came in here, he had come in the past two summers looking for his family and we were able to find them, just by typing in a few letters. We found them through the system,” Mead said.

Mead has been inputting hundreds of thousands of records into the database since the city purchased the CIMS program in 2007. Before that, the information was all imputed into record books by hand.

“Up until a few weeks ago, she was still typing the [cemetery plot] deeds out on a typewriter,” said Tom Eldridge, director of Public Works, who is amazed at how far the system has come since the department took over care of the cemeteries back in 2004. “Teresa likes to stay busy. I don’t know if another person would be dedicated enough or willing to do it.”

She started with the Highland Lakes Cemetery, the smallest of the three, with 524 graves. She moved on to the largest cemetery, Woodlawn, with 18,720 graves. Next will be Saccarrappa, the oldest of the cemeteries, with burials on record dating back to 1790s.

The cards, books and other records used to keep track of who is buried in what plot in which cemetery is a confusing system. The cards have the owner of the plots and who is buried in each section. Books are kept of each section in the cemeteries and where there are open spaces. And of course, there are records that tell who is in each grave and any obituary or other death information.

“Sometimes I flip through the death cards and I feel like I know these people. You find out about their families and how they died. There’s even a whole section of unknown men and women. I try to take more time with those to see if I can find out anything. Sometimes you can figure out so-and-so was the wife of someone and I write that on their card,” Mead said.

The input process is side work, and with a busy office, it’s easy to see why it’s taken six years to launch CIMS.

Mead leafs through the stacks of records and inputs facts into the database: name, age, date of death, date of birth, whether the person served in the military, family members, cause of death and any other information available.

The cause of death will probably not be public information when the site launches, but Mead has learned a lot about history through the causes, like the staggering number of suicides in Westbrook during the Great Depression and the high death rate from consumption, now known as tuberculosis.

Since starting the implementation process, Mead and the city have found out a number of things about their own graveyards not known before. For instance, Woodlawn has a free burial plot no one knew about until Eaton came across a few graves with a surname that, on the records, had only been marked as being buried in the “free lot.”

“We thought we only had one,” Mead said. “There may be more.”

Tom Burns, who helped map the cemeteries to match up with system, said he is trying to find some of his family, buried in a cemetery in New York, but is having trouble locating their exact plots. He said as far as he knows, Westbrook is the only city in the state and among just a few in the country to have a cemetery tracking system.

There are 23 cemeteries in Westbrook. The city takes care of many of the cemeteries because of the veteran graves. While the new database will only be available for the three main sites, the Westbrook Historical Society website, www.westbrookhistoricalsociety.org/collections.html, has many of the smaller, family cemeteries listed with information on who is buried there.

“I think it’s great. Having that data helps in genealogy research and helps families find their lost loved ones,” said Mike Sanphy, president of the historical society. “When the data is available it’s a win-win situation, I believe.”

Mead has many plans for the next steps of this ongoing project. One would be to look at the genealogy of the grave-site owners, some of whom purchased plots for their family and left them in their wills, but those plots remain unclaimed. Another would be to go through all the files of people who never finished paying off their gravesite. Some of those files are decades old.

Westbrook Public Works Director Tom Eldridge and Administrative Assistant Teresa Mead in Woodlawn Cemetery. Mead has just finished a five-year project that tracks every grave in Woodlawn Cemetery. Photo by Rich Obrey