Recordkeeping for a small Illinois cemetery

Illinois regulates cemeteries under the Cemetery Oversight Act, administered by the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR). The Act was written after a serious scandal at a large commercial cemetery, and one of its better features is that it does not treat a country cemetery run by five volunteers the same as an operation with staff.

The exemptions

The Act carves out cemeteries by size and character. The one that matters for most association, church and township cemeteries is the partial exemption, which turns on two things together:

• an all-volunteer board, and
• an annual budget under $100,000.

Meeting both does not remove your obligations. It reduces them. Some cemeteries — very small and family burial grounds among them — fall under broader exemptions still. Which category you are in is worth establishing precisely rather than assuming, because everything else follows from it.

What a partially exempt cemetery still has to do

Broadly, and in the Department's own framing:

• Keep a map of the cemetery showing where graves are, and keep it up to date. The map must be certified by the cemetery manager and available for public use, and it must let someone locate a burial by relating an index to the grave locations shown.
• Post the required signage — including the Department's consumer hotline number in English and Spanish — though partially exempt cemeteries are relieved of some of the other signage requirements.
• Post your hours and your rules.
• Provide reasonable maintenance, judged against your contracts and your capability.
• Preserve interment rights if you renumber anything. Sections, blocks and lots may be renamed or renumbered internally, but not in a way that damages existing rights or makes remains harder to locate.

Cemeteries that are not fully exempt also answer the Department's questions through the Cemetery Oversight Database when prompted.

The one to look at hardest

It is the map. A great many small Illinois cemeteries are, in practice, relying on a paper plat that has not been formally updated in decades, with the current state of the ground held in one person's memory. That is the requirement most likely to be quietly unmet, and it is also — entirely separately from the Act — the thing whose absence causes real trouble the day a family asks a question or a board sells a plot twice.

A map that satisfies the requirement is a map that shows graves and can be tied to an index, is current, and is available to the public who ask. It does not have to be a survey.

Where to read the real thing

• IDFPR — Cemetery Oversight
• IDFPR — Cemetery Oversight Act frequently asked questions, which is where the exemption categories are explained most plainly
• Illinois DNR — cemetery laws, useful for historic and abandoned burial grounds

Where Sexton fits

Sexton was built for cemeteries of exactly this size, and the map requirement is the reason its plot map works the way it does. You lay out sections as grids of plots and drag them until the screen matches the grounds — no survey, no GIS, no mapping bill — and each plot carries who owns it and who is interred in it, which is the index-to-location relationship the requirement is describing. The map prints on letter paper for the office wall, and the interment register and annual report print with it.

Whether that satisfies your obligations is a question for the Department and your attorney, not for me. What I can say is that keeping a current map and a register that ties names to graves is the substance of what is being asked, and that it is a great deal easier to keep current on a screen than on a wall.

I am in west-central Illinois myself. If you are an Illinois association and want to talk it through, call 217-288-3351.