“Many people are surprised when I tell them what I do. It’s not your run-of-the-mill sort of job,” Goffinet says. “If they were going to buy a burial plot, though, these people would be really happy I’m mapping their cemetery.”

Cemetery maps are invaluable to genealogists. They are a practical necessity for an undertaker planning a funeral and a church selling burial plots. It’s not unheard of, Goffinet says, for the same burial plot to be sold by mistake to two people. “That can be more than embarrassing. It can be a real problem.”

Goffinet has mapped Old Union Church Cemetery and Townsend Cemetery in Townsend, Del., and Drawyers Cemetery and St. Anne’s Episcopal Cemetery in Middletown, Del., as well as several cemeteries in upstate New York.

Plotting a cemetery can be as simple as mapping the locations of all tombstones, along with the names and birth/death dates, or as elaborate as recording all the writings on every stone.

Usually Goffinet works from old, fading cemetery maps and incomplete records gathered from file cabinets and church members. Often, extensive unwritten information resides only in people’s memories. In cases such as Old Union Church Cemetery, where all the original maps had been lost, Goffinet had to start from scratch, and her job was as much historian as it was cartographer.

Deciphering the engraving on centuries-old grave markers can be a challenge. Time can wear the engraving nearly smooth, and the characters that remain frequently are covered with lichens and obscured by stone discoloration.

Goffinet has a simple trick: She sprays shaving cream on the stone, then wipes it with a window squeegee. The shaving cream fills in the indentations, making the words visible again.

“There was one worn gravestone at Old Union Church Cemetery that was written completely in German,” Goffinet says. “I knew if I didn’t translate and record that information now, it would be lost forever. It gives me great satisfaction to make sure these people are not lost, that a record of their existence survives.”

Goffinet was an art/anthropology major at UD in the ‘70s. She returned to UD’s geography department in the late ‘80s to study cartography. She has worked for Delaware Administration for Regional Transit (DART) and local organizations, creating maps for public transportation routes, tree locations, park trails and book illustrations. She prefers mapping cemeteries and park trails, she says. The quiet, outdoor locations are so much more pleasant than bus stops and corporate cubicles.

Goffinet also has found that cartography adds dimension to her varied arts and crafts projects. Among the wall hangings she has made recently are maps created from fabric and woven fiber.

In addition to her artwork, which she sells through local galleries, Goffinet has a residential-reorganizing business, which she terms “Household Excavation.”

“Actually, home organizing is not as unconnected to cartography as it may seem,” she insists. “With mapping, you’re organizing two-dimensional space. With homes, you’re organizing three-dimensional space.”

Goffinet shares her Rising Sun, Md., space with her husband, Dave Cottrell, and her son,Talbot, still at home. Her older children are Justin and Tamara.

One thing is certain . Goffinet will never get bored with her work. “So many people are willing to settle for jobs they don’t like,” she says. “I’ve defined my career as finding and doing the things I enjoy. Why can’t having fun and working go together?”