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CEMETERY PROJECT
Siena College in Loudonville is partnering with St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands to create a "cyber cemetery" that will allow researchers and genealogists to roll a computer mouse over a map to look for specific gravestones in the historic cemetery.

Jennifer Boniello, a senior environmental studies major at Siena, initiated the project as part of her GIS mapping course last winter. GIS is a tool for visualizing and mapping spatial data.

Her coursework blossomed into an internship this semester. She is collecting data on gravesites using GPS and aerial photographs and integrating it into an online map.

She's already loaded a whole section - 89 lots with up to 30 graves each - onto a preliminary website, complete with photos of the monuments and lists of names. It could take up to five years to catalogue all 100,000 gravestones in the 114-acre cemetery.

The collaboration is part of Siena's academic community engagement program, said Dr. Kate Meierdiercks, assistant professor of environmental studies at the college and instructor of the GIS mapping course.

Other student projects have included mapping walking and bicycle paths at St. Agnes and Albany Rural Cemetery and mapping abandoned properties in Albany's South End. Other students could pick up the cyber cemetery project after Ms. Boniello finishes her internship.

"Organizations always have things that they need mapped, and we always have students who need mapping skills," Dr. Meierdiercks noted.

Kelly Grimaldi, historian at St. Agnes Cemetery, said other digital information sources on cemeteries, like Findagrave.com and Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, are unsophisticated and incomplete.

Some of the thousands of monuments on St. Agnes' 50-acre Founder's Hill date to the 1860s; acid rain and pollutants are decaying the marble ones and obscuring their inscriptions. Ms. Grimaldi said many inscriptions contain information not found on the cards used to index the burial plots.

This is especially important for those researching Irish immigrant ancestors, since many of their records were lost in a 1921 archives fire in Dublin.

"To find that information on a gravestone - for a researcher, it's priceless," Ms. Grimaldi said, adding that many enthusiasts will travel to visit gravesites in person: "If they could just do that with a [computer] mouse, that's pretty neat."

Marble gravestones are also clues to the wealth of their occupants, Ms. Grimaldi said. "You just don't find that anymore. They're incredible pieces of art."


PRAYER APP
Do you have a prayer request? There are 1,400 nuns across North and South America waiting to receive it through a new cell phone application whose evolution traces back to Albany.

"Prayers Please," a collaboration among communication directors at the four provinces of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, may be the first prayer intention app from a religious order.

It's already available on iPhone, BlackBerry and DROID cell phone platforms, as well as the iPad tablet. Those without smart phones can go to www.prayersplease.com.

By mid-March, more than 100 requests had already been received from all over the world. The religious orders funnel them to sisters designated as prayer ministers or those who just like to pray.

At St. Joseph's Provincial House in Latham, the prayers will be written on a list outside the chapel every day.

Previously, prayers could be requested through the St. Joseph sisters' province websites or by phone, but many sisters noticed that their 20-something nieces and nephews wanted something faster.

"We kind of thought that was an age group that would appreciate the prayers, but didn't have time," said Sister Mary Rose Noonan, CSJ, communication director of the Albany province. The phone app is "something they can do just about instantaneously."

The project follows a long legacy of the religious order meeting the needs of the times, going back to its 1650 founding in France as one of the first non-cloistered communities to serve the poor, sick and imprisoned. In 1836, the French sisters came to the U.S. to instruct deaf children in St. Louis; in 1858, they came to New York to teach children of immigrants building railroads.

More recently, Sisters of St. Joseph founded day nurseries before day care became common, as well as The College of Saint Rose in Albany and St. Mary's Hospital in Amsterdam.

The app project brings the order's charism into the 21st century. "It is indeed a need," Sister Mary Rose said. "People do want prayers. They do want to find ways to deepen their spirituality."

The app took a year and a $16,000 grant from the John, Marie, Joseph Whalen Foundation to develop. Prayers Please is free and will not require the user's name or track personal information.

"We don't want anything that would make people hesitant," Sister Mary Rose explained. "We're just hoping that it will bring people peace and hope. We want it to be a pure gift."[[In-content Ad]]

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