by Trevia Wooster Beverly, August 1996
The author is a member of the Harris County Historical Commission and an active cemetery preservationist who offers help to those seeking to restore and preserve old cemeteries or obtain Texas State historical markers.
Cemeteries seem to be the favorite haunt of the family researcher, but often distance precludes a physical visit. Clayton Library can help remedy that!
This article will discuss some of the cemetery research material available at Clayton and will provide the reader with useful information on how to best use this material. When I was asked to prepare this article, I already knew there was a vast amount of material. What I was not sure of was how I could present the topic in such a short space—but off to the catalog I went!
If you haven’t yet used the new Everybody’s Catalog (E-Cat), what an experience you’re in for! E-Cat gives us the possibility of accessing a tremendous amount of material. I discovered, for example, that there are 1673 titles in the Houston Public Library system containing the word “cemetery.” And that does not include related titles/terms such as graveyards (24), burial places (9), epitaphs (120), sexton records (6), tombstone inscriptions (199), or church yards, death records, grave markers, funeral home records, etc. Of course, not all of this material is available at Clayton, and not all of it will contain genealogical information.
If you know the name of the cemetery and its location, it will be fairly easy to determine if Clayton has a publication or film on that cemetery. Just enter the name and location of the cemetery into E-Cat. If you do not know the cemetery name and would like to obtain a list of the cemeteries for which publications or microfilms exist, then, again, E-Cat can help. The entry “Harris County, Texas, Cemeteries” will yield a list of all Harris County cemeteries that have been published and are in the system—those at Clayton will be so noted.
The small, selected list of works described in the following paragraphs will show the reader a variety of titles under which our nation’s cemeteries are listed.
Mr. & Mrs. R. D. Gray’s Gray’s Cemetery Records (Fort Worth: American References Publishers, 1968) (976. G781. USA) covers selected cemeteries in Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Missouri. The Texas selections are from Cherokee, Clay, Jack, Montague, Palo Pinto, Parker, Comanche, Eastland, Johnson, Knox, Callahan, and Wise counties. Note that this book is in the USA section, a perfect example of why we should look both in the state section and in the USA section.
Madeline Siekman Mills’ Relocated Cemeteries in Oklahoma and Parts of Arkansas, Kansas, and Texas (Tulsa, 1974), while covering more than one state, will not be found in the USA section but with the Oklahoma books (976.6 M657 OK).
Another instance of a multi-state reference not shelved in the USA section is Robert Foster Johnson’s Wilderness Road Cemeteries in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia (Owensboro, Kentucky: McDowell Publications, 1981) (976.9 J68 KY). This should show us how important it is to browse not only the shelves but to learn to use the catalog.
John Ogden Leal’s Index of the San Fernando Archives: San Fernando Church Burials 1744-1760 (San Antonio: privately published, 1975) (976.4351 138 TX), which includes marriages and other church notations, consists of photostat pages from the original books. In this case, had you not known the name of the church, but entered “church burials” into E-Cat, you would have come up with this title.
Thomas Bridgman’s Epitaphs from Copp’s Hill Burial Ground, Boston: With Notes (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, 1989) (974.4 B852 MA) was originally published in 1851 and includes the epitaphs found on Suffolk County gravestones (in addition to a register of births, etc.). The key word is epitaph rather than cemetery, but if you wanted the Copp’s Hill cemetery, here it is!
Mrs. Mark Joseph Nash’s Bodies Removed from the Camp Hood Area and Reinterred in Gatesville, Killeen and Copperas Cove Cemeteries (typescript; Killeen, Texas: 1978) (976.4 N252 CORYELL) is, of course, to be found with the Texas books (the only state books shelved by county designation).
Jerri G. Chasteen’s Our People and Where They Rest Master Index: An Index to 1,043 Old Cemeteries Within the Boundary of the Old Indian Territory (Pryor, Oklahoma: Jerri Chasteen, 1995) (976.6 C489 OK) is a major source of cemetery data for the Oklahoma Indian territory.
Mark Hughes’s Bivouac of the Dead (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, 1995) (973 H897 USA) will not give you names and dates of individuals but will provide lists of burial sites for the Civil War (Union only) and Indian Wars periods. Other books will guide you to our national cemeteries and others of specific military interest; a good example is Carolyn Reeves Ericson’s compilation, Confederate Soldiers Buried at Vickburg... (St. Louis: F. T. Ingmire, c1981) (976.2 C748 MS).
Numerous county histories, especially those published in recent years, will include not only a listing of the cemeteries within that specific county, but, like Heritage and Progress, History of Grimes County, Texas (Navasota, Texas: Grimes County Historical Commission, 1982) (976.4243 H673 GRIMES), they will often give transcriptions of the individual cemeteries.
Examples of cemetery-related works to be found in Clayton’s foreign collection include A Guide to Irish Churches and Graveyards, compiled under the direction of Brian Mitchell (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1990) (941.5 G 946), and Directory of Graveyards in the Dublin Area: An Index and Guide to Burial Records (Dublin: Dublin Public Libraries, 1990) (941.5 D598), both in the Ireland section, and Revalee and Robert Kim Stevens’ The Protestant Cemetery of Rome: The Register of St. Paul’s Within The Walls (Baton Rouge: Oracle Press, 1981) (945 S845 ITALY). General directory listings include the 11-volume set, Omni Gazetteer of the United States of America (Detroit: Omnigraphics, Inc. 1991) (917 O55 USA), which is divided into regions. Although every cemetery in the U.S. is not listed, this is an excellent source to help identify possibilities, as is John “D” and E. Diane Stemmons’ The Cemetery Record Compendium, Comprising a Directory of Cemetery Records and Where they May be Located (Logan, Utah: Everton Publishers, 1979) (973 S824 USA). Another general resource is Cemeteries of the U.S.: A Guide to Contact Information for U.S. Cemeteries and Their Records (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1994) (929 C394 USA). Directories are essential tools that will enhance your research capabilities, and many have been compiled at the state and local level. Representative state compilations include such works as Oregon Cemetery Survey (Salem: Oregon Department of Transportation, 1978) (979.5 O66 OR) and Kim Parson’s A Reference to Texas Cemetery Records (Humble, Texas: privately published, 1988) (976.4 P332 TX). At the county level are such detailed works as Trevia Wooster Beverly’s At Rest: A Historical Directory of Harris County, Texas, Cemeteries (1822-1992) (Houston: Tejas Publications & Research, 1992) (976.414 B571 HARRIS). Publications such as Douglass Milburn’s Our Ancestors’ Graves: Houston’s Historic Cemeteries (Houston: Houston Public Library, 1980) will bring the subject down to the city level. These types of directories can be found for a large number of states.
Published obituaries are excellent sources for finding the cemetery in which an ancestor is buried. One example is Betty Couch Wiltshire’s Mississippi Newspaper Obituaries, 1862-1875 (Carrollton, Mississippi: Pioneer Publishing Co., 1994) (976.2 W756 MS).
Periodicals are a vital source of information on all levels. PERSI, the 15-volume Periodical Source Index (Fort Wayne, Indiana: Allen County Public Library Foundation, 1987) (016.929 P445 USA), is perhaps the best source to use. [See Gay E. Carter, “Perusing the PERiodical Source Index ” The CLF Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 4 (November 1995), pp. 4-5.] In PERSI, you will want to look up not only the word cemetery but other related words, just as you would in E-Cat. In addition to PERSI, there are other excellent published indexes for specific periodicals and journals. One such work is Trevia Wooster Beverly’s 25-Year Topical Index to Stirpes, Quarterly of the Texas State Genealogical Society (1961-1985) (Houston: Tejas Publications & Research, 1986) (GEN PER TX), with 110 listings under “cemeteries.” A second example is Thomas A. Dorrough’s 5-volume set, Index to Cemeteries Listed in Tap Roots (976.1 T172 AL), for Alabama and Georgia. Your own search will turn up similar references in your specific area of interest.
There will be times using E-Cat when you will pull up a title and see the notation “no status location.” I’ve received a couple of different answers on this, so check it out carefully. It is possible that the book has been received and is still in processing, i.e., not yet available for use. This was the case with Jeannette Holland Austin’s 30,638 Burials in Georgia (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1995). I anticipate that this 708-page book will be an excellent resource once we get it. The same “no status location” was found on the entry for Avis Deavers’ White Church Cemetery (Taylor County, Texas: privately published, 1972); I suspect this one is already in the system and the listing needs updating.
The finding aids to our microprint collection will unveil numerous items among the film and fiche. To look for your state of interest in the finding aids notebooks, go to the state and county you are researching and see what you find. In the Missouri binder, I found an unexpected treasure. Three xerox pages from the St. Louis Review Christian Burial Supplement, “A History of St. Louis’ Catholic Cemeteries,” gives data on these cemeteries that vary in date from 1770 through 1984. Read this before going to the particular cemetery fiche; it may save you some time and will give you valuable history on the eleven Archdiocesan cemeteries in the metropolitan St. Louis area. Other material found through the use of our microfilm finding aids includes Death & Funerals from the Dallas Morning News, 1955-1957 (7 reels); and Galveston County, Texas: Index to Deaths & Burials 1800’s-1910 (13 reels).
Returning for a minute to the use of E-Cat: It is important to point out one very useful feature of the systems that is sometimes overlooked. When you pull up the “Magazine Index” and enter a selected topic, you will see, beside the date of the article, the word “Text.” You may then access the full text of that article. One such article, by Fouad Ajami, is “The Graveyards of Jerusalem,” from the September 11, 1989 issue of The New Republic. This article mentions several interesting people, including Sir William Matthew Flenders-Petrie, an Englishman (1853-1942), a portion of whose body is buried in Jerusalem (which part of the deceased is missing and why?), and Flight Lieutenant Walter Achilles of the Bavarian Flying Squadron (1881-1917). The article also makes mention of the remains of German soldiers who fell in World War I, of a corner reserved for British soldiers who fell in the Arab Rebellion of 1936-39; of Allied soldiers (perhaps some Texans) who fell in World War I; and of the unknown soldiers. This is just one example of the kinds of cemetery-related material one can access through E-Cat, a powerful new tool available at Clayton and other Houston Public Library branches.
Assignment space limits the amount of material that can be covered here; however, I would encourage researchers to further explore the use of E-Cat, to browse the finding aids collection, and to examine some of the references noted in this article. Cemetery research can yield very valuable information, and, as illustrated here, much of that research can be done right inside our wonderful Clayton Library!