Toccoa Cemetery Project Ongoing, But Nearing End

Work on mapping the Toccoa City Cemetery and computerizing those records is almost complete.

Faith Bryan and Brandon Carlock from the Georgia Mountains Regional Commission appeared at last week’s Toccoa City Commission work session to provide an update on their project.

They have been working on the project since June 2014.

Bryan said that work is nearing completion and that by the end of September, Toccoa City Clerk Fredda Wheeler should have access to the cemetery’s records on a computer.

“If a family member comes to you and asks you ‘Where is my aunt or my grandfather buried?, you can search by their name, you can pull up their name and then pull up any photographs of their headstone and where they are located in the cemetery,” said Bryan.

During Monday’s work session, resident David Neal brought up a concern that people had been buried on top of already existing graves over the years.

No evidence of that was presented by the Georgia Mountains Regional Commission during the presentation.

Bryan said to find that out definitively, the city would have to pay for further study.

“If the city wants to get into even deeper expenses, it is real expensive to bring out ground-penetrating radar,” said Bryan. “That could be done in those areas that he is questioning, but that is an added expense and is something Georgia Mountains is not capable of doing, so you would have to get an outside consultant to come in and do that.”

Bryan and Carlock did say that there are at least a dozen unmarked graves at the city cemetery and there could be as many as 50 to 100, a number that they will continue to work on.

City officials say that having this work done will help make cemetery operations easier.