City-Owned Cemeteries: Data Available
If you had a history of all burials in City of Tallahassee-owned cemeteries, you'd notice something very odd: The more recent a burial occurred, the more likely it is that you can find information about the burial in the Master Burial Index. And the opposite is also true: Information about older burials is less likely to appear in the index.
Here's the current breakdown (as of June, 2005):
| Cemetery | 19th Century | 1900s | 10s | 20s | 30s | 40s | 50s | 60s | 70s | 80s | 90s | 2000s | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GREENWOOD | 76 |
375 |
127 |
578 |
|||||||||
| OAKLAND | 9 |
2 |
21 |
112 |
413 |
231 |
185 |
199 |
233 |
402 |
752 |
362 |
2921 |
| OLD CITY | 10 |
27 |
12 |
49 |
|||||||||
| ROSELAWN | 1 |
2 |
4 |
6 |
44 |
770 |
1317 |
1420 |
1643 |
629 |
5836 |
||
| SOUTHSIDE | 1 |
163 |
542 |
915 |
1290 |
810 |
3721 |
Note the gaps for the earlier part of the 20th century, and note that almost nothing earlier than the 1910s is included. This is not because no one was buried in these cemeteries any earlier than that. (For instance, as you can learn from the history of Old City Cemetery, that cemetery was established in the 1840s.)
In part, the reason is that some records simply don't exist. (Again using Old City Cemetery as an example, a fire decades ago destroyed many records.)
In the case of Greenwood Cemetery, its earliest records (from the time before it was maintained by the City) were held mostly by a private funeral home. The funeral home used general verbal descriptions of where a burial occurred, rather than classifying gravesites according to the block/lot/grave space designation. We hope to work with a local historian to try to bring these early records into synch with the current location scheme.
But the main reason why earlier decades are not yet represented in our main database is simply that we began keeping automated records in the mid-1990s, and then primarily on a "going-forward" basis. (The main database is used primarily to record information on the sale of City-owned plots, not on burials as such.) We're caught up now -- effectively including all burials that have occurred since 1985 or so. In particular, note that the records for the newest City-owned cemetery, Southside, are complete.
Our next (much bigger!) task will be to incorporate all the earlier records as well as the more recent. It won't be done tomorrow, as the saying goes -- just researching and entering the information which appears on these pages has taken us close to ten years. But we are working on it, and will post updates here on the Web site from time to time.
By all means, if you have specific questions about information not found here, please contact our Cemeteries unit for help.