Graveyard discovery crawl

St. Francis Episcopal Church is located on

Main Street in Rutherfordton, NC.

It was originally

constructed for

Col. Franklin Coxe and his family.

The Coxe family

graveyard is located behind the

church, adjacent

to the town

cemetery.

Research a local church graveyard or town cemetery and

find the following:1.When was it started?

2.Who was responsible for its inception?

3.Is the graveyard private, family, or public?

4.How many people are buried there?

5.What significance does it have to your town?

Create a Power Point presentation that addresses

these questions. Include pictures and other media to help present your findings.

Use your field notes from the site, at least one interview, and

two on-line sources.

Click HERE or HERE to find more information about the Coxe Family.

Saint Francis Episcopal

Church has many

stained glass windows, including

three Tiffany windows.

Complete one of the following art

projects:

1. Create your own stained glass window in a

medium of your choosing.

2. Take pictures of local stained glass windows and use

a program such as GIMP to

manipulate a virtual picture

collage.

Cemetery Demographics Activity

AP Environmental Science

Population Demography

• In this portion of the activity, you will gather birth and death information about people in a cemetery near you.

• You will need to record sex, birthyear and death year of at least 100 gravestones.

Enter in Excel Spreadsheet

• Click on the button below to link to a pre-formatted spreadsheet that will calculate the ages of individuals at death.

• Then you can enter your birth and death and sex information into the spreadsheet.

Graphs• When you have finished entering the data, sort it by birth year and then

by age. Be sure to select the whole table from this line down:

• Use Excel to calculateaverage age by 10 yeargroups.

• Then create a graphthat is divided up by10 year divisions andhas average age formen and women inthose time periods.

Death Birth Age Death Birth Age

1831-1840

1851-1860

1871-1880

1891-1900

1911-1920

1931-1940

1951-19600

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Coxe Family Demographics MenCoxe Family Demographics Women

Answer these questions:

1. What is the average age of all men? ….women?2. What is the life expectancy of a male/female in the

first 30 years of your data as opposed to the last 30 years?

3. Go to www.census.gov and find our state. Compare your findings to the national census data for NC.

4. Log onto the forum page and post your answers and then compare your answers to the two questions above to others answers.

Culminating Paper

• In a 2 page paper (no less than 1 ½ and no more than 2 ½) discuss your findings. Some guiding questions might be:– Has average life expectancy changed over the time period

represented in your cemetery?– Are there differences between the findings based on the

location of the cemeteries you compared to?– Are there time periods where the average life expectancy

deviates drastically and if so, can you think of reasons why?– Did you find any evidence that infant mortality varied

through time?