June 28, 2024
Genealogists love cemeteries. Reading headstones and imagining the lives of those who are buried there lures us to cemeteries – even ones without our ancestors buried there!
Despite this fixation on cemeteries, many genealogists overlook some of the genealogical information to be found there. The names and dates on the headstones are important, but that’s just the start of what can be found.
If a cemetery has an office, make sure you visit when it’s open. Cemetery offices often have records beyond what’s written on headstones. My great grandmother and her parents are buried in the Ogden City Cemetery in Utah. Their graves are next to each other, and all three have headstones that match. Although headstones are the definition of the phrase “set in stone,” their styles have changed over time. It’s possible to tell the period when a stone was made just by its shape and carving. My ancestors died in the late 1800s, but their headstones don’t resemble the stones seen on other graves from that era. When I first visited them, I guessed they were placed more recently, perhaps in the 1940s or 1950s. I wondered why.
A visit to the cemetery office supplied the answer. At this cemetery the office keeps detailed records about interred there. It includes information such as date of birth and death, place of birth and death, name of parents, name of spouse(s), and even cause of death. In the case of my ancestors, I knew most of this information already, but there were also records about the burial itself. They stated that the headstones had been placed in the early 1950s and had been paid for by my maternal grandmother. She was the daughter of and granddaughter of these ancestors.
Before her purchase, there had been no stones on the graves. My grandmother was a child when her mother and grandparents died. She was nearly seventy years old when she placed the headstones for her family. My grandmother was poor, but she found the money for these headstones. Clearly, it was important to her that her mother and grandparents were memorialized in this way. When I first visited the graves, my grandmother herself had been gone for decades. I never would have solved the mystery of the too-new headstones without the cemetery records.
Cemetery offices frequently also have maps which show burials where no headstone has been placed. These unmarked graves are often for small children and babies. Parents sometimes couldn’t afford to place markers for them. Cemetery records of their burial may be the only records of these lost children.
Contact the cemetery office or a sexton who keeps cemetery records for the burial grounds where your ancestors are interred. Some cemeteries may not have as much information as the Oden City Cemetery does, but you’ll never know unless you check.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society