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NORTHBORO —  Fortunately for the town, William R. Allen happens to like history, and he doesn’t mind typing data into a spreadsheet. 

Mr. Allen, a Northboro resident who grew up and went to school here, has volunteered to help computerize the town’s cemetery records. 

Records of people buried at Howard Street Cemetery are kept in handwritten books, and some of those old books are falling apart. The Department of Public Works, which stores the records, would like to transfer the information to a computer and create a mapping system that provides easy-to-understand information to anyone with Internet access. 

A geographic information system map, similar to the town’s zoning and tax maps already available online, would cost at least $10,000, Kara H. Buzanoski, director of public works, estimated in June. Software for a searchable database would cost at least $5,000, she said. 

That’s money Northboro doesn’t have. The town’s cemetery budget was depleted this year, and next year is not likely to be better. When Mr. Allen read about this problem in a Telegram & Gazette story in June, he decided to help. 

He has experience reading and handling old documents, and he has free time. The 42-year-old received a master’s degree in history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in February. Since then, he hasn’t been able to find a paying job where he can use his expertise. Helping Northboro was a way to spend some of his free time. 

“In part, it was something to do,” he said. “It was a way to get some more experience looking at records… It was a way to do something that people might find useful. And it sounded fun.” 

Mr. Allen’s coursework at UMass included how to read, handle and store old records. He also has worked with GIS maps. 

In Northboro these days, he spends some time working at the DPW office in Town Hall and some time working with photocopies of original documents at home. Since the middle of summer, he has entered almost all of the town’s handwritten cemetery records into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. 

The spreadsheet has answered one important question no one in town could answer a few months ago: How many people are buried in Northboro? 

Mr. Allen’s laptop says 6,553. That number is an estimate, because some of the oldest graves, from the 1700s, have no records — and some records may be duplicates. 

For each grave, Mr. Allen is trying to find the name of who is buried there, the person’s birth and death date, whether the grave is marked by a gravestone, whether the grave has a deed and who holds the deed. When he has it, he’s inputting information about family and military service. 

The spreadsheet lists dozens of members of the Ball family, who lived in Northboro for centuries and are buried all over the cemetery. If you’re looking for, say, Mary Ball — there are four of them, and one Marey — the spreadsheet holds the information to help locate the right grave. 

To check the information he found in town records, Mr. Allen has been taking long walks in the cemetery, reading gravestones. Sometimes he carries a pair of hedge clippers, in case he needs to prune some greenery to read a stone. 

He also is saving scans of the original records in PNG computer graphics files. 

Once all the records are computerized, town officials can stop thumbing through the fragile record books, and the books can be stored safely away. 

All this will help the town when it finally has the money to create online maps of the cemetery. 

“Everything we’ve done is targeted toward putting it into software … that we could relate to the GIS,” Ms. Buzanoski said. 

She said she couldn’t guess how much money the town is saving because of Mr. Allen’s help. 

“It’s really invaluable that he’s able to devote as much time to it as he does,” she said. 

Mr. Allen said he spends up to 10 hours a week on the cemetery work. 

He was not always a history buff. A graduate of Algonquin Regional High School, Mr. Allen worked in theater production and management in Pennsylvania and Maryland before deciding to switch to a different profession. He’s trying to break into the museum and historical site field. But in that field, as in many others, there aren’t enough jobs for all the people who want them. 

So he’s continuing to help the town and hoping this work will bolster his résumé. 

“I’m happy to provide something that makes other people happy,” he said. 

Contact Priyanka Dayal by e-mail at pdayal@telegram.com.