Where is Diamond Jo?

For someone unfamiliar with the local cemetery, transversing the site may be a bit daunting as there are no diagrams available to help. The Moorcroft Cemetery is the only graveyard in Crook County to have no formal map of those who have been laid to rest there.

This may be about to change, though. As part of her project in the digital collections stewardship class at the Colorado, Wyoming Area Museums Association (CWAM), Moorcroft's West Texas Trail Museum curator Cindy Mosteller, with the approval and assistance of the Moorcroft Council, has taken up the challenge to create a comprehensive schematic all the way back to the very first resident, Diamond Jo Thompson, who was laid to rest in the furthest northwestern corner.

The class will teach directors to digitize collections and digitize them for ease of access to the public online. Mosteller found this to be a much-needed and to this point overlooked project.

"There is a list of every person in every cemetery in the county except Moorcroft," she says.

In the next couple of weeks, she will begin the process by visiting with Clerk/Treasurer Jesse Connally at Town Hall to make a copy of the roster of the plots sold and those buried there. She plans to create a spreadsheet, but she also wants to go further by mapping the Moorcroft Cemetery.

The town is associated with Crook County's GIS program, allowing various kinds of mapping of county and municipal features for various applications. The council has approved Mosteller's use of this attribute to create a schematic of the graveyard.

Mosteller anticipates the project will take over a year to complete, but is looking forward to the task. She hopes to create possible street names to help navigate the physical site as well as information on those who lay in the plots along with those who purchase them, filling out this part of Moorcroft's fundamental yet untraced part of the community at last.

The director welcomes anyone willing to help with this endeavor, whether in part or throughout; those interested are welcome to drop by the museum and discuss what they may do with Mosteller.