Family Cemetery Records

Cemetery records include online and paper documents, and headstones. In some cases, cemetery records have been obtained directly from a cemetery. In most cases the information is from Find A Grave (findagrave.com) or Ancestry.com. A headstone or its picture is a form of source document.

Find A Grave information is sometimes provided by the cemetery, but more usually by a family or amateur contributor. When provided by a family member, a detail may not be available from other sources. Source citations from Find A Grave include the Memorial ID which can be uses to see the web version of the Memorial, and includes family-relevant text extracted from the web site Memorial.

Notes:

• Cemetery record information is provided by the next of kin responsible for the burial. They may recall incorrectly or the cemetery may make a mistake taking down the information or typing it. For online sources, there may be similar errors. It may be hard to get access to the original paper record for verification.
• Similarly for headstones, there may be errors unknown to or overlooked by the next-of-kin.
• A headstone may have been placed at the time of burial, or much later.
• Memorials and headstoness (cenotaphs) may or may not be located at the burial site and may be  placed much later.
• Handwriting on documents is often hard to interpret. You may have to refer to Handwriting Samples (image), or see Historical Handwriting, and compare writings on the same page.