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Cemetery Records
Home » Genealogy » Sources for Genealogy Research - Official Records » Cemetery RecordsPosted by Your Guide on July 6, 2006 9:48 PM
Cemetery records are also a great source of information about long ago relatives. Tombstones can tell us when a person was born, when they died, and who they married. They sometimes tell us about the person's parents and how they lived and died.
Soldier's graves often contain information about the soldier's branch of service, which unit they were in, and whether or not they were killed in battle.
However, many tombstones have long ago crumbled and are fading fast. Other graves were marked with simple wooden markers that were carved with a knife or written on with a pencil. Once the immediate family members of that loved one have died, the knowledge of who is buried in that grave is gone, too.
But even those grave stones that still exist and are very legible can give us wrong information. Stone carvers made mistakes, as they still do, and many times there was no way to correct the mistake. Today we would ask a carver to replace a stone with a mistake, but that did not always happen when stones were much harder to quarry.
There are also stones that contain misinformation because the family members of the deceased could not read or write. When presented with the carved stone of their loved one, they did not realize that it contained errors and thus, would not ask that the information be corrected.
In any and all of these cases, genealogists must not only use the information they find on the stone as a clue, they must also confirm it with official records when possible. When no official records exist, other forms of records are available to help in confirming information about a person's life.
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