Liz Riley, an associate professor in Middle Georgia State University’s (MGA’s) School of Business, is part of a painstaking effort to catalog every burial in Macon’s historic Rose Hill Cemetery and create a searchable database for the public. In this Q&A, she talks about how her MGA academic role meshes with this unique history project (on which she is collaborating with area historian Kathleen O’Neal), and her discovery of so many stories among the people buried at Rose Hill.

What unique challenges have you faced in turning thousands of handwritten notes and scattered records into a searchable digital database?

There have been so many challenges! 

As someone with a background in IT, I thought there would be a way to use technology to quickly organize these records. The reality was very different. The records of Rose Hill Cemetery include handwritten records, a PDF of records, books of records scattered around the internet, and books of records in which just one copy is found in the Washington Library. The hundreds of pages of handwritten records are faded and written in a script that sometimes isn't readable. The PDF will not accurately and completely convert to a spreadsheet, Word doc, or database. All of the records have some number of errors and sometimes they don't agree. Determining which records are correct sometimes requires pulling in other resources such as old newspaper articles. Sometimes there is simply no way to determine what is correct. 

In addition to sorting out these records, my friend Kathleen O'Neal and I decided that in order to improve the accuracy of the records, we should do a manual inventory of headstones. There are over 16,000 people buried in Rose Hill. There are less headstones, but still, that is a lot. We started last March, and we are now about one-third done. We anticipate that it will take another year. 

How does your academic work at Middle Georgia State intersect with a community history project like this one?

First, this is a project that requires a lot of organizing, coordinating, and strategy. That's exactly what operating a business is about. Second, some of what I teach in Excel has been extremely useful because we are using Excel as the first place to hold the information. Third, my "old" IT skills have come in handy as we move the data from Excel to a database on a website. Lastly, we've been publishing stories about people buried in Rose Hill Cemetery on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The information covered in my social media class and my communications class comes into play as we sort out how, when, where, and what to post. 

What has surprised you most as you’ve worked to document Rose Hill Cemetery graves?

The stories. There are so many interesting stories. Rose Hill Cemetery essentially contains the history of Macon. 

The second thing that has surprised me is the sadness of so many people's lives. There are around 1700 children buried in Rose Hill Cemetery and a lot of them died of diseases that we now have cures for. There are also stories of just pure tragedy such as nine-year-old Mary Eliza Guerineau whose dress caught on fire while she was participating in stage performance. Or Jane Armistead Day, whose first husband died during their wedding celebration and whose second husband died in battle six months after they were married. 

On a more positive note, I am stunned by the number of people who visit Macon to see the Allman Brothers Band members' graves. Every time I am in the cemetery, there are people from out of town visiting those graves. We have met people from locations including Florida, Texas, California, and Brazil. The gentlemen from Brazil had come to the U.S. for the purpose of visiting Macon and seeing everything related to the Allman Brothers. We also met one of the actors from Tulsa King who stopped by for the Allman Brothers. 

Once the database is complete, how do you envision the public using it to connect with the city of Macon’s history and their own family stories?

We plan to publish the database on a website that's available to anyone who wants to look up their relatives and find them in Rose Hill Cemetery. Find-A-Grave is good for some of that purpose but Find-A-Grave is crowdsourced so sometimes it is not accurate or complete. Our goal is to be as accurate and complete as possible.