“Working with the digital cemetery map makes our work a lot easier,” says Daniel Felsmann from Schongau town council. The implementation went very smoothly in cooperation with PBSGEO and was described by the employees as “swift and courteous”.
Schongau, a town in the Upper Bavarian district of Weilheim-Schongau, is known as a stop on the Romantic Road between Augsburg and Füssen. The town is divided into two communities: the district of Dornau (hamlet) and the main town of Schongau. Residents of Schongau can choose between two cemeteries when looking for a burial place.
The city cemetery with 850 graves is located in the city center within the city wall and consists partly of very old graves. For this reason, it is now a protected monument and ensemble. The forest cemetery in Schongau West has a modern layout and currently has over 1,800 graves. The burial options are varied. The types of graves range from classic burial graves, urn graves in steles, in the wall or in a communal grave, to the increasingly popular tree graves and children’s graves. Around 130 burials a year have to be processed, points out Daniel Felsmann, an employee of Schongau town council.
The digital cemetery map in Schongau
Thanks to multi-platform technology, friedhofsplan.de can be accessed on any device. These include desktop, tablet and smartphones. A separate mobile application is available for iOS and Android.
Citizen information system
“Now that we have switched to friedhofsplan.de, we can not only offer our citizens a convenient digital search for graves, but they can also select and reserve graves digitally in advance. Our entire administrative process has also been greatly simplified. We create work orders on the PC according to individual orders. We can store photos for each grave,” Felsmann cites as examples. Paper plans are now history. The historical graves in the municipal cemetery have also been recorded and can now be displayed digitally.
The burial calendar has also been integrated into the digital cemetery map of the town of Schongau, making it easier to work with local funeral directors. “We are now able to offer free funeral appointments for reservation online. Funeral directors can reserve appointments online. Public funeral appointments can also be displayed on friedhofsplan.de,” Felsmann says with satisfaction.
Advantages of cooperation
Daniel Felsmann and his colleagues value the cooperation with PBSGEO. “We have gained a comprehensive insight and have learned everything that is possible when switching to a modern, digital cemetery management program. We were particularly impressed by the many additional functions,” reports Felsmann. “The PBSGEO team took a look at our plans and data records and painstakingly digitized everything so that we can now work comfortably on the digital platform.”
“Although our old GIS program and our old paper plans served as the basis for the digital conversion for PBSGEO, they are now long forgotten,” Felsmann points out.
The citizen information system has been well received by everyone in Schongau. There are QR codes at the entrances to the cemeteries, which visitors can use to search for graves. The town council would also like citizens to enter information about graves and add pictures and stories. The aim is to give anyone interested the opportunity to find out more about the people who have found their final resting place in Schongau’s cemetery.
Source: Cemetery culture, 01.02.2025
