Cemetery association bylaws

Bylaws come up at three moments: forming an association, applying for or defending nonprofit status, and the afternoon a new board president discovers that nobody can find the current ones. All three are ordinary and none of them are an emergency, provided you know what the document is supposed to contain.

What follows is a plain account of the sections a small cemetery association’s bylaws usually have, and the questions each one is there to settle before anybody is arguing about it.

The sections, and what each is for

• Name and purpose. The legal name of the association and what it exists to do — hold, maintain and administer the cemetery. Short, and it matters for nonprofit filings.
• Membership. Who is a member: lot owners, descendants, dues-paying members of the community, or the congregation. This decides who may vote, which is the question every contested meeting turns on.
• The board. How many trustees or directors, how they are elected, how long they serve, whether terms are staggered, and how a vacancy is filled between meetings. Staggered terms are worth having: they stop an entire board leaving at once, which is how associations lose their institutional memory.
• Officers. President, secretary, treasurer, and the sexton if the sexton is an officer rather than an employee. What each is responsible for, and specifically who holds the records, because that is the duty most often left unstated.
• Meetings. The annual meeting, how special meetings are called, notice, and what constitutes a quorum. A quorum too high to reach is a common and paralysing defect in old bylaws.
• Plot sales and burial rights. What is actually being sold — in most states a right of interment, not a piece of land — who may authorise a burial, whether plots may be resold or transferred, and what happens to plots abandoned for a long period.
• Perpetual care. What portion of each sale goes to the fund, that the principal is not to be spent, and what the income may be used for. Your state may set this; the bylaws should match it rather than contradict it.
• Rules for the grounds. Monument sizes and foundations, what decorations are allowed and when they are cleared, planting, fencing, and when mowing happens. The rules people actually contact you about.
• Records. That the association shall keep a register of interments, a record of lot ownership, and a map — and who is responsible for them. Many old bylaws omit this entirely and it is the omission that costs most.
• Amendment. How the bylaws themselves are changed: what vote, at what kind of meeting, with what notice.
• Dissolution. What happens to the assets and, importantly, to the records if the association ever winds up. Usually they pass to a township, a county or another cemetery organisation. Nonprofit status generally requires this clause.

Where to find a model to start from

Do not write these from a blank page. State historical commissions, state cemetery associations and denominational offices publish sample bylaws for small cemeteries, and several are freely available as PDFs — the Texas Historical Commission’s sample is widely used well outside Texas, and church bodies publish guides for congregations that hold a churchyard. Start from one of those, then have it read by somebody who knows your state’s cemetery law before it is adopted.

Cemetery law is genuinely state-specific. Perpetual care percentages, what may be sold, abandonment periods and reporting duties all vary, and a model from another state will be close but not right.

If you cannot find your existing bylaws

This is more common than anyone admits. Try, in order: the minute book, the secretary’s files, the previous president’s house, the church office if there is one, and then the Secretary of State’s corporate filings for your state, where articles of incorporation and sometimes bylaws were filed when the association was formed. County recorder’s offices occasionally hold them too.

If they genuinely cannot be found, the board can adopt new ones. Do it deliberately, at a properly noticed meeting, and put a copy in more than one place afterwards — including a digital copy that is not in a single person’s house.

Bylaws are not the records

Worth saying plainly, because they get conflated. Bylaws are how the association governs itself. The records are who owns which plot and who is buried in it. Bylaws should say that the records must be kept and by whom; they are not a substitute for keeping them, and an association with immaculate bylaws and a missing register is in far more trouble than the reverse.

Where Sexton fits

Sexton is the records half — the register, the deed holders, the plot map and the association’s books — and it produces the annual report your bylaws probably require. What belongs in that report is set out in the cemetery annual report, and the other guides cover taking over records and getting them off paper. What Sexton does sets out the records side in full.