By Pepper Fisher
PORT ANGELES – We’re learning more and more every day that whatever it is we want to do or have to do, “There’s an app for that.”
Soon that will extend to finding a loved one’s grave at the area’s biggest cemetery. The Port Angeles Parks and Recreation Department has just contracted with the company CemSites to manage much of the city’s in-house side of operating a 17-acre cemetery with over 12,000 grave markers.
But Parks and Rec Director Corey Delikat says the best part of the new system is how it will benefit the public.
“This has been a really cool project that’s actually been in the works for about 8 years. And it really is to get our cemetery up to speed from a records management standpoint, and also from a GIS mapping system, where folks can go online, go to our website, find their loved one’s grave, click on that and find the information. It’s got a lot of cool features as well. Like, you could go to the cemetery, download the app, and you could literally just, like, Google Maps and just walk to your loved one’s grave.”
Delikat said they’ll need a little time to get the needed program uploaded to the city’s website, but he’s expecting cemetery visitors to soon be able to use their phones to grab a QR code at the cemetery, get the app right there, and immediately find any grave onsite.
“It’s just going to be a really cool way to do an efficient process for families who have lost their loved ones. And I think, to me, that’s the most important thing, outside of us maintaining that, if something ever happened to our records out there, they’ll be stored in the cloud and we will have those records forever.”
The city’s Cemetery Coordinator Alex Jones estimates the new system will go live in about six months.
(City of Port Angeles photo)