Norris City Cemetery
 

About norriscitycemetery.org

This web site is a hobby project not associated with the cemetery's owners, East Norriton Township.

The goals of the web site are twofold: First, to make data about the cemetery and those interred there available to those searching for genealogical data. Second, to enhance the recreational opportunity afforded by the cemetery by highlighting points of interest and thus encouraging local residents to explore the site.

The names and dates that appear on this site come from different sources: first, the inscriptions on the markers themselves; second, the official records of the cemetery, as reconstructed; and finally, from contributions and other sources. This site attempts to walk the fine line of helping visitors make sense of often conflicting data without biasing the information towards a presumption of the "truth."

Read more (way more) about these sources on this page.

Using the Map

The map contains a top-down representation of Norris City Cemetery, with markers positioned and drawn to scale. Shadows are used to provide an indication of the relative height of each marker. You can use the map to navigate to any Lot page. more…

Recenter the map by dragging the mouse. Use the control in the upper left corner to zoom in (+) or zoom out (-). A double-click zooms in and recenters at the point that was clicked.

On the Map page, the map starts out zoomed all the way out. On a Grave page, the map starts out zoomed all the way in, and the displayed grave is identified by a flag marker. To see the location of a grave in the context of the entire cemetery, zoom the map out; the flag marker will remain to indicate the location.

When the map is zoomed all the way in, additional controls are enabled. If one clicks near a marker, information is displayed in a pop up. The information that's displayed depends on whether the marker is associated with the currently selected lot or not. If a pop up does not appear, be sure you are clicking in the vicinity of a marker, and that the map is zoomed all the way in.

If the marker is not associated with the current Lot page (or any time, if using the map from the Map page), the pop up contains a link to the Lot page, with a list of the last names associated with that Lot.

If the marker is associated with the current Lot page, the pop up contains the marker's inscription. For lots with multiple markers, this allows one to identify which stone carries which inscription.

Notes on the technologies

This site and its support systems rely almost exclusively on an array of fantastic free software. more…

HTML5 Boilerplate provides the underpinnings of the site, and includes the basic page structure and default cross-browser compatible styles. PHP Template Inheritance helped with consistency across all the pages. The data are stored in a SQLITE database. Leaflet was chosen for displaying the map, though it is admittedly overkill for this purpose. The photographs and graphics are displayed using the Floatbox media viewer. Most of the colors used here are from the Solarized palette. The text type face is PT Sans, and the display face is Artifika.

On the back end, SQLiteStudio was used for database management. The map was drawn with Inkscape and was guided by a geo-referenced aerial photo published by the State of Pennsylvania. wxPHP and wxFormBuilder were used to create data entry and editing scripts. Other graphics work was done using ImageMagick and GIMP. LibreOffice was used for preliminary data preparation. The NetBeans interactive development environment was originally used for HTML and code editing, and debugging. The VSCodium editor is the current code and content editing tool.