Cemetery record book template

The record book is the document a cemetery will be asked about for the next hundred years. Genealogists, families, funeral directors and your own board all come back to it, and it is the one record that cannot be reconstructed once it is gone.

This template is a plain interment register with two additions most cemeteries wish they had made forty years earlier.

What is in it

Interments — one row per person, with name (including middle and maiden), date of death, date of interment, age, the plot location, whether it was a burial or a cremation, the funeral home, the deed holder, the source of the record, and notes.

Gaps and questions — a second tab, and the one nobody keeps.

The two columns people leave out

Funeral home. Their register frequently goes back further than the cemetery’s and is more complete, and they will normally look somebody up for you. Recording which one handled each interment turns a dead end into a phone call.

Source of this record. Where the entry came from: “stone”, “ledger p.44”, “told by J. Ward, 2026”. When two records disagree in ten years’ time — and they will — this column is the only thing that settles it. It costs three words per row and it is the single most valuable habit in cemetery record keeping.

The gaps tab

Almost every cemetery keeps a record of what it knows and no record at all of what it has already tried to find out. So the same fruitless search gets repeated by a new volunteer every few years.

Use the second tab to write down what you cannot answer, where you already looked, who asked, and when. A list of known gaps with the dead ends marked is worth more to your successor than a tidy register that quietly guesses.

Where to look when the register cannot answer

In order: your own register and lot cards under every spelling, the deed and lot-owner records, local funeral homes, the county clerk for the death record, volunteer transcription projects, and the oldest person who mows. There is a fuller account in when a family cannot find a grave.

Type what you know, mark what you do not

The temptation when transcribing is to fill every cell. Resist it. A register with honest holes is a working document; a register that guessed once, in 1998, is a document nobody can trust any part of. Blank means unknown, and the notes column is where you say which kind of unknown it is. If the spreadsheet stops being enough, what Sexton does keeps the same register with a map attached.