Old Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, Queens, holds the Ohel, the resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and the graves of hundreds of people connected to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Finding a particular grave means knowing a block, a row and a number, and the cemetery’s own records are a search form built for one name at a time.
This app turns that into a map. Visitors search a name, see the block and the exact grave on a plan of the cemetery, read a short biography, follow links to obituaries and articles, and jump between relatives buried nearby.
How it works
- The cemetery plan is modelled as blocks, each holding one or more sections: uniform grids of graves with their own row count, numbering direction and headstone orientation.
- People point at a section, row and grave, or at a structure such as an ohel that covers several plots.
- Family relationships are stored once and reversed automatically, so a wife links to her husband and a son to his parents without double entry.
- A built-in editor lets me draw sections, place people and review AI-drafted biographies before they go live.
- The whole thing is a static site, so it works on a phone standing in the cemetery.
Where it stands
The Ohel section itself is mapped, with 338 people placed. The full cemetery roster, some 138,000 records across 70 blocks, has been pulled so the remaining Chabad-affiliated graves in blocks 78, 92, 94 and 95 can be matched and placed next.