Oak Hill Cemetery

As part of a preservation project for Oak Hill Cemetery, a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) asked raSmith to provide survey services for creating a base map of the cemetery to catalog the tombstones. DAR is a nonpolitical, nonprofit service organization comprised of multi-great granddaughters of America’s first veterans who were soldiers in the Revolutionary War. The organization’s mission is to promote historic preservation, education, and patriotic activities such as supporting veterans and active military. Oak Hill Cemetery is registered with the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and is the final resting place of Nathan Hatch, a Revolutionary War veteran who settled in Wisconsin after the founding of America.

raSmith performed the services pro bono, leveraging unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) photogrammetry technology to produce low-altitude, high-resolution orthorectified imagery for the site. This project also incorporated ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data (provided by others) to assist in identifying any unmarked graves. raSmith’s imagery, the GPR data, and paper records from Oak Hill Cemetery will be used by GIS professionals to create an online interactive map of the cemetery, linking virtual grave sites to the available historical data.