Cemetery Records

I have seen tombstones listing the town of birth for Irish immigrants in Catholic cemeteries in California, for Finnish immigrants in Lutheran cemeteries in Minnesota, and for Irish immigrants in New York. Always try to find a tombstone or sexton’s record.

Here is a perfect example.

Online Methods for Finding Cemetery Records
Use these Internet sites to accomplish the following steps:

Ancestry.com

  • Use census records here to pinpoint a place of death.
  • Possibly use information on One World Tree(SM) to locate possible place of death.

USGenWeb.org

  • Look on the state page and find county listings.
  • Search for listings of the burials in all the cemeteries in that county.
  • Include the information about the cemetery and the directions to the cemetery in your notes.

FamilySearch.org

  • Use the Social Security Death Index to narrow state and sometimes county of death plus an exact death date for those who died from about 1960 to the present time.
  • Use the Ancestral File to see if others have already listed the death date.
  • Use the Pedigree Resource File sources part (notice the CD# and Pin# then go see the CD at the local Family History Center) to see if others have already listed the death date.
  • Use the IGI to see if others have already listed the death date.

Google.com

  • Search for the name of the cemetery. Might lead you to a sexton address to write a letter.
  • Search for the newspapers discovered previously in a search of the Union Catalog of Newspapers to see what newspapers were published during the time period in question.

Findagrave.com

Search for an ancestor’s name or area.

Traditional Methods of Find Tombstones

Many tombstones were made from materials that eventually wore down, graveyards were moved, or stones were never put over a grave. However, just like church records many of these records are available in published genealogical collections that were gathered in the mid-1800s before loss of information on the original tombstone. See some of the examples below.

This image is from a DAR collection where little cards were put together from tombstone inscriptions.

This second image was from a "Source Index of New Jersey Families" found on film FHL 852,836. It indicates that the Agatz family was found buried in the Presbyterian Church Yard at Westfield.

Notice this third image from the table of contents of a periodical, The Detroit Society of Genealogical Research Magazine. Notice people have been abstracting the cemetery records of "Crapo Cemetery in Green Township, Macosta County, Michigan." If your census searches have lead you to this area, you could find this resource by searching PERSI. By writing to the Allen County Public Library and for a small fee, they would send you the pages of this periodical.

Notice also the baptismal records in Detroit, the Nationalization records in Detroil, and Death Records in Berrien County. I love genealogical periodicals!

One more periodical, I cannot resist. This is from the Polish Genealogical Society of Michigan.

This periodical contained information on how to trace Polish ancestors in general using some of the sources you are learning in this course, but also histories of the first Polish church at Birch Creek at the Falls in Perronville. Below are images of the first three churches belonging to this group. While this was an early 1900s group rather than a nineteenth century example, it was interesting because it spoke of a donation of back water swamp land for a cemetery south of the dam. If the dam on Ten Mile Creek were ever rebuilt, the cemetery would be flooded. Therefore a transcript of the cemetery stones were taken along Country Road 30. It was virtually overgrown with many stones toppled or weathered.

Well, maybe one more image from a Wisconsin periodical that illustrates some wonderful church and therefore, cemetery, locators. I hope you have seen that there are many published resources available for the nineteenth century immigrants.