New app helps locate grave sites of Huntsville veterans

As we honor our nation’s veterans today, the City of Huntsville has announced the launch of a new app that can help people find the final resting places of Huntsville’s veterans.

The app, created by the City’s Geographic Information Systems Department, allows users to locate each veteran’s grave. Here’s more:

More about this new app

Each year, several groups and organizations place flags and wreaths on the graves of veterans on holidays like Memorial Day, Armed Forces Week, Christmas and Veterans Day.

City Director of Cemeteries Tara Sloan said these organizations previously had no way of knowing how many flags or wreaths to purchase or how to find veterans’ graves. Enter this new app.

“We appreciate the hard work of the City’s GIS Department on this application to ensure veterans are honored. Out of the estimated 80,000 to 100,000 individuals buried in Maple Hill Cemetery, they identified 2,220 veterans.”

Tara Sloan, Director of Cemeteries

Click on the Maple Hill Map link to start your search.

Families of veterans whose graves are not found on the app are encouraged to email MapleHill@HuntsvilleAL.gov and provide that information.

Plenty of work went into development of this app

Finding the graves of more than 2,000 veterans — among more than 80,000 grave sites — was not an easy task.

In summer 2024, Will Ford, a University of Alabama in Huntsville intern working in the City’s GIS Department, was tasked with this undertaking.

To gather the data needed to create this application, Ford walked every acre of Maple Hill Cemetery with a GPS device — logging names, birth and death dates, military branches and the wars in which they fought.

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