What a cemetery sexton does

A sexton is the person who looks after a cemetery. In a small association, a township, or a country church, that is usually one person, often unpaid or nearly so, and the job has two halves that have almost nothing to do with each other.

One half is the ground: mowing, the trees, the fence, marking a grave before the backhoe arrives, opening and closing. The other half is the paper: who owns which plot, who is buried in it, what was paid, and where all of that is written down. Most people who take the job are handed the first half and discover the second half later, usually the week somebody phones with a question.

The word is old. It comes from the same root as sacristan, the person who kept a church and its yard, and in much of rural America it still carries that sense: the person who keeps the place, and keeps the record of it.

What a cemetery sexton actually does

The formal job descriptions published by townships tend to list the visible work. Here is the whole of it, in rough order of how often it comes up.

• Locating and marking graves. Reading the map and the register, walking out to the section, and putting a stake where the grave goes. This is the task where an error is permanent and public, and it is the one that depends most on the records being right.
• Opening and closing, or arranging it. Some sextons dig; many coordinate a contractor and a vault company, and meet the funeral director on the day.
• Selling plots and recording the sale. Taking the money, issuing the certificate of ownership or deed, and writing the sale into the register so the next person knows the plot is spoken for.
• Recording interments. Name, date, plot, section, and the funeral home. This is the record families and genealogists will ask about for the next hundred years.
• Answering enquiries. "Where is my grandmother buried?" "Do we still own the two spaces next to my father?" Both questions get asked constantly, and both are answered out of the records or not at all.
• Grounds and upkeep. Mowing, trimming around stones, storm damage, the drive, the gate, and deciding what to do about a monument that has begun to lean.
• Reporting to the board. How many burials this year, how many plots are left, what came in, what went out, and what needs doing. In most associations the sexton is the only person who knows any of it.

In a township the statutory record-keeper is often the township clerk rather than the sexton, and the duty of care sits with the trustees. If that is your arrangement, the records still have to agree with the ground, and somebody still has to be the one who reconciles them.

The records a sexton keeps

Whatever it is written on, a cemetery's record has to answer four questions. If you are new to the job, this is the list to check what you were handed against.

• Who owns each plot. The lot owner, the date of sale, and the deed or certificate number. Ownership outlives burial: a family can own spaces for eighty years before using them.
• Who is buried in each plot. With the date, and ideally the funeral home, because their register is often more complete than the cemetery's.
• Where each plot is. A map that agrees with the stakes in the ground. Section, block, lot, space, in whatever scheme your cemetery has used, including the places where the scheme changed.
• What is owed and what is held. Unpaid balances on plots, annual dues if the association charges them, donations, and the perpetual care fund with its own accounting.

Two of those look like the same question and are not. "Who bought it" and "who is buried in it" have to be answerable separately and together, and a record that can only be sorted one way makes half the enquiries hard.

What does a cemetery sexton get paid?

It varies more than almost any job of comparable responsibility. At small rural associations the sexton is often a volunteer, or receives a modest annual stipend voted by the board — a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year. Township and municipal sextons are more often paid hourly or salaried, and national job listings for the title tend to fall in the range of roughly twenty to forty-odd dollars an hour depending on whether grounds work and equipment operation are part of the role.

The honest summary: if you are being offered the job at a small cemetery, expect it to be a stipend rather than a wage, and expect the record-keeping half to take more of your time than anyone told you.

How people become sextons

Almost nobody trains for this. The common routes are: a board member who volunteers, a church member who is asked, someone who already mows the property and gradually inherits the rest, or a family member of the last sexton. There is no licence and no standard qualification in most states, though your state may regulate the cemetery itself — Illinois, for instance, requires even small volunteer-run cemeteries to keep a map showing burial locations, available for public use.

What helps: being methodical, being willing to say "I do not know, let me look," and being the sort of person who writes things down the day they happen instead of the week after.

If you have just taken the job

Do these first, in this order, before you worry about anything else.

1. Find every record and put it in one place. Binders, index cards, loose maps, a shoebox, a spreadsheet on somebody's old computer. Gather it before you sort it.
2. Photograph it. Every page, on your phone, today. It takes an afternoon and it means a fire or a flood costs you nothing irreplaceable.
3. Walk the cemetery with the map. Find the places where the map and the stones disagree, and write those down rather than fixing them from memory.
4. Interview whoever remembers. The previous sexton if you can, the oldest board member, the person who mows. Much of what a cemetery knows has never been written anywhere.
5. Write down what you cannot answer. A list of known gaps is worth more to your successor than a tidy record that quietly guesses.

There is a fuller version of this in taking over a cemetery’s records when the keeper is gone, written for the case where the person before you left without handing anything over.

Where Sexton fits

Sexton is a program for the second half of the job — the records, not the mowing. It keeps the plot map, the deed holders, the interments, the balances and the perpetual care fund in one place on your own computer, so that "who owns it" and "who is buried in it" are one lookup rather than two hunts through two different books.

It is built for the person keeping the records, not for an IT department, because in a small cemetery there is no IT department. Everything stays on the association’s machine, there is no account to lose, and every record can be written out to plain spreadsheet files at any time.

If you have just taken this on and are trying to work out what you inherited, the demonstration runs in your browser with sample records, and what Sexton does sets out the whole program in writing. You can call and ask me anything without buying anything.