A family cannot find a grave

Somebody has driven three hours to visit a grandmother's grave, and the cemetery cannot tell them where she is. It happens constantly at small cemeteries and it is nobody's fault in particular — it is the accumulated result of records kept by different people, in different systems, for a hundred years.

Where to look, in order

• Your own register and lot cards, under every spelling. Old records are phonetic. Try the maiden name, the married name, and the name misspelled the way a clerk would have heard it.
• The deed or lot owner records rather than the burial records. Many burials were never written down, but the person who bought the lot usually was — and families are buried in family lots. Finding the lot often finds the grave.
• Funeral home records. Local funeral homes keep their own registers, often going back further than the cemetery's, and will normally look somebody up for you.
• The county clerk for the death record, which frequently names the place of burial.
• Volunteer transcriptions. Genealogy societies and grave-photograph projects have walked and recorded a remarkable number of small cemeteries. Someone may have already read the stone you cannot find.
• The oldest person who mows. Seriously. Sextons and grounds volunteers carry a map in their heads that exists nowhere else.

When there is no stone

Plenty of graves were never marked, or were marked with wood, or with a stone that has sunk. A metal probe in experienced hands can find a vault or a footstone under sod, and ground-penetrating radar can be hired for a genuinely important case. Both should be a last resort, and both need the board's say-so before anyone starts pushing rods into a cemetery.

Say what you actually know

Tell the family the truth in three parts: what the records show, what the records do not show, and what you did to check. A confident wrong answer is far worse than an honest "our records place her in this section, but the individual grave is not recorded." Families are remarkably understanding about gaps in hundred-year-old paperwork. They are not understanding about being told the wrong grave.

Stopping the next one

Every one of these calls is a gap you can close permanently, and the closing is worth more than the answer:

• Write down what you found, on the plot record, the day you find it.
• Write down the searches that came up empty too, so the next person does not repeat them.
• Record burials and lot sales in the same place, so the two questions have one answer.
• Note where a grave is unmarked, rather than leaving it looking like open ground.

Cemeteries that answer these calls easily are not the ones with better history. They are the ones that wrote down what they learned the last time somebody asked.

Where Sexton fits

Sexton keeps the deed holders and the interments against the same plot, so "who bought it" and "who is buried in it" are one lookup instead of two hunts. You can search by family name or by the name of the person interred, click the plot, and read everything known about it — including notes about what is not known.

One thing to be plain about: Sexton is the office's register and does not publish a public search page for families. If you want relatives to look up an ancestor on a website by themselves, another product will serve you better, and I will happily tell you which.