Documenting Older Cemeteries

I am documenting all the cemeteries I can find in the tri-county area, focusing mostly on the inactive ones. My main source [[so far) is: http://www.interment.net/us/mi/. This listing is far from complete.

The strangest one I have found so far is in Southfield off Webster. If you take Webster west of Pierce [[NW of the Greenfield/12 Mile area) to the end, you will hit a road on the edge of a playground. Continue down that road until it ends. There are some apts there with a lone gravestone. I forget the name on the stone.

Thanks for any help.

Have you checked out www.findagrave.com ???

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Originally Posted by Ray1936

Have you checked out www.findagrave.com ???

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Yes I have. I was considering offering my services [[photos) of grave sites photo requests.

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Originally Posted by Fulcanelli

Yes I have. I was considering offering my services [[photos) of grave sites photo requests.

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I found their list of cemeteries and it is a great resource. I'll be busy here for a while. Thanks again.

Try the website Detroit1701. It has a category for cemeteries which should be helpful in your initial research.

That cemetery off Webster behind the shopping center was connected to a farm, I believe, with most graves belonging to the same family. It was relatively ignored until the area began being developed in the mid to late 70s. If I recall there was a trailer park in there for some time before, and some people were taking stones to be used for steps. Once the park was gone, the houses started being built and then the cemetery was rediscovered and I hope properly dealt with. I was a new Southfield resident at the time, late 70s. There is probably some information in the historical archives.

Southfield has some other old cemeteries that are not in common use today. There is Pioneer Cemetery [[ think that is the name) on the east side of Lahser Road about halfway between 10 Mile and Civic Center. Southfield Cemetery, where I believe you could still buy a plot, is located north of Civic Center between Lahser and Berg. There is a road in to it, but it is between a bunch of apartment building driveways, a little hard to spot. It is a tree lined, beautiful spot surrounded by office buildings on Northwestern and apartments on Civic Center. I believe there is also a small cemetery associated with the old Reformed Presbyterian Church on Evergreen just north of the Civic Center and library.

Here are three from the Northville area -

Rural Hill Cemetery is located on the south side of Seven Mile a short distance west of Sheldon Road. On one of the cemetery sites it is listed as being on Main Street, which is wrong. This a beautiful place!

Waterford Cemetery [[also known as Meads Mill Cemetery) is on the east side of Franklin Road which is north of Five Mile Road between Bradner and Northville Roads.

Thayer Cemetery is on the north side of Six Mile Road just a bit east of Napier Road. This is right beside an old schoolhouse.

Kelton

I always wondered about Millar Cemetery over on 16 Mile right by Freedom Hill. I ventured into the cemetery maybe 15 years ago and noticed some of the graves had birth years well before 1800. I'm not sure how the Red Run River has affected the land and plots over the past few decades. Looks like it was dug deeper in order to handle drainage.

ray.. i was just looking through findagrave and noticed my in-laws are on there. they were put on by two different people with names i don't recognize. is that really ok for someone we don't know to do so? i'm kinda pissed.

Thanks for the info on that one cemetery in Southfield connected to the farm.

I have been photographing the other ones mentioned in Southfield for years. But thanks.

And last month I visited three cemeteries in Northville: Rural Hill, Yerkes, Oakwood [[AKA Cady...locked - no admittance), and Union Cemetery on Six Mile just west of I-275/96. And I hit Waterford last week. The only one I haven't visited yet is on Six Mile and Napier.

Find-a-grave really has a great list and I think has just about all the burial grounds documented.

My interest is in creating atmospheric photographs: I am not a history buff. In 2004, I found the Redford Cemetery on Telegraph to be greatly abandoned and neglected. The weeds were high and broken fragments of stone heads were all about. It was exactly what I was looking for. However, these days it gets a regular hair cut and looks a lot more presentable.

IF you know of any burial grounds not listed on www.findagrave.com, let me know. Otherwise, I am working through that list.

I'm confining my search to Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties.

Thanks.

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Originally Posted by Maof

ray.. i was just looking through findagrave and noticed my in-laws are on there. they were put on by two different people with names i don't recognize. is that really ok for someone we don't know to do so? i'm kinda pissed.

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I have been a member of Find A Grave for over 7 years and have added over 6700 memorials and almost 5600 photos, in addition to submitting coordinates for several hundred cemeteries and "cleaning up" literally thousands of memorials to correct/add information.

The majority of my memorials are of those who have passed who have no relationship [[direct or otherwise) to me or even my husbands family.

My purpose for the work I do on the site is NOT just for my own personal search for ancestors. It is to hopefully allow that person looking for their long lost relative to find out where they were buried. It is to hopefully ensure that even if something happens to the headstones and markers in a cemetery today are not forgotten and lost as they have been in the past, but instead are documented and left for those in the future. It is as a memorial to those, of any race, from any country, buried in any place, to not be forgotten. I have hundreds of headstone photos I'm still trying to manipulate in order to get posted - many of these headstones are probably beyond the point where any photo manipulation will ever identify who they belonged to and I can assure you, a HUGE number of cemeteries have garbage records - surprisingly enough, even many of the "new" cemeteries, not just little old forgotten and long since gone church cemeteries. A person who mattered lies under those headstones. They had families who cared and didn't want them forgotten, but that as generations die out, that is exactly what has happened.

I'm not sure why you'd be pissed that someone cared enough to add a memorial for your in-laws. Several people I never knew before created memorials for family members of mine and I'm thankful for the work they all did, especially the ones on my mothers side of the family - since without finding the memorial, I'd have no idea where most were buried [[or for a few, even when they died). A site volunteer even got a picture of my aunt's grave marker in Ventura, California, which thrilled my mom who had never been able to visit her half-sisters gravesite. And because of the site, in January, I finally was able to put flowers on the grave of a friend who died from leukemia when we were 15. I'd been searching for where she was buried for years with no luck, until someone created her memorial, along a few thousand others in the same cemetery that had not been added.

if i wanted my family's headstone, photo and holy card plastered over the internet, i would have done it myself. i find it odd that someone would cruise through a cemetary just to click a snapshot of someones headstone they don't even know.

...and my mother-in-law wasn't even cold and it was posted three days after she died?!

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Originally Posted by Maof

if i wanted my family's headstone, photo and holy card plastered over the internet, i would have done it myself. i find it odd that someone would cruise through a cemetary just to click a snapshot of someones headstone they don't even know.

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Click on the name of the person who entered it and simply ask them to remove the entry. 9 times out of ten they're glad to comply.

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Originally Posted by Maof

if i wanted my family's headstone, photo and holy card plastered over the internet, i would have done it myself. i find it odd that someone would cruise through a cemetary just to click a snapshot of someones headstone they don't even know.

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As Ray said, ask the contributor to delete it. If you had an account on the site, you could also request management of the memorials.

There are contributors who ignore rules of the site and copyright law and take photos from funeral home websites, which can also be removed by sending an email to photo[[at)findagrave[[dot)com if you include the memorial number. Either the person who added the photo and holy card knew your in-laws enough to have a photo of them and attend the funeral and scan a holy card or the funeral home used already plastered it [[and the obituary) all over the internet.

Even if the memorial is removed, it may be added by someone else in the future who comes across it in the cemetery or if it was added from an online obituary, from that. The only way to ensure that future generations have no clue where someone is buried is to have no obituary, anywhere and have an unmarked grave.

I'm not sure how documenting cemeteries could in any way seen as odd, but whatever floats your boat.

Courtney said, "I'm not sure how documenting cemeteries could in any way seen as odd, but whatever floats your boat."

In most cases, it's largely folks who are knee-deep into genealogy. That's my bag, anyway. I've travelled the country finding the grave markers of my family going back to 1620 [[yep, a Mayflower descendant), and have posted them to the site with as much biographical info as I've found. I'm dazed by the historical facts I've found about my line. Makes me feel guilty that I'm such a comparative nothing. :)

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Originally Posted by Ray1936

Courtney said, "I'm not sure how documenting cemeteries could in any way seen as odd, but whatever floats your boat."

In most cases, it's largely folks who are knee-deep into genealogy. That's my bag, anyway. I've travelled the country finding the grave markers of my family going back to 1620 [[yep, a Mayflower descendant), and have posted them to the site with as much biographical info as I've found. I'm dazed by the historical facts I've found about my line. Makes me feel guilty that I'm such a comparative nothing. :)

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You are so right Ray. Find a Grave has been very helpful in my family history research.

After much research, I was able to track one of my wife's ancestors to a 1610 arrival in Jamestown. They were on the Sea Venture, which sunk off Bermuda, and the group was on Bermuda for 9 months, built another ship and sailed to Virginia.

i'm all about finding "long lost relatives" and genealogy, history etc. and am not trying to criticize anyone for doing so, but i like my privacy for myself and family. i guess when someone dies it's not so private anymore. i tried clicking on the "contributors" name [[whom we do not know) to ask that it be taken off with no luck. i'm assuming you have to be a member.

Maof:

Your passed mother-in-law is the cousin, niece, sister, distant cousin by marriage, etc. Your link is more immediate, but not exclusive.

We are links in a large network.

As for privacy, I don't think we have much of that anymore.