ABOUT OUR BURIAL RECORDS & MAPS

The Cortland Rural Cemetery is beginning the long process of transferring its primarily hard-copy records and related documents into an easily searched database for use by our operations/office staff -- and, ultimately -- for use by the public, via our website.

      While we tackle this endeavor, please be patient with us!

      As you would expect at a nearly 150+ year-old cemetery, burial records consist of a wide variety of information in an equally wide array of formats, ranging from hand-written records from the late 1800s, to type-written pages from the mid-1900s, to computerized records. And the same goes for our maps, which run the gamut from hand-rendered, one-of-a-kind maps to more modern renderings and computerized formats.

     Daunting enough in and of themselves, the process of managing, cross-checking, converting, and archiving all of these items is further complicated by the fact that we must do so bringing to bear our very limited financial resources, paid staff hours, and volunteer labor.

In other words, we do the best we can! Meantime, we currently have four documents available to you here:

1) First, we are proud to offer you use of our new-in-2015 "cemetrail": Featuring 20 interpretive signs, each of which were developed in cooperation with students and faculty from SUNY Cortland, this self-guided tour of the cemetery will provide you with educational insights on some of our cemetery's noteworthy burials, history and operations, artistic assets, and geological attributes. Along the way, we hope you will also enjoy the marked trees of our arboretum, also established with help from the college. Enjoy!

> Read the remarks from Board President John Hoeschele, delivered at the "cemetrail" ribbon cutting or see additional photos from the event.

> Two other articles worth reading, if you are interested, are the college's summary of the project (here) and a blog written and posted by Syracuse.com's Glenn Coin (here).

INTEREST IN LOCATING A GRAVESITE?

As indicated elsewhere on our website, the Cortland Rural Cemetery is a non-profit cemetery that is not funded by municipalities ~ but is facing sizable demographic and revenue-generation challenges (aka: declining traditional burials). Accordingly, we must operate on an extraordinarily lean operating budget and with a modest staff.

       Even so, we will make every effort to assist those interested in locating a specific grave in our cemetery. In return, we ask for the following:

      > please be patient with your request: some of our records/maps are in modern formats and are easy to access, while others are currently only available in hard-copy formats dating back decades. We will do our level best to answer your inquiry accurately and in a timely fashion, but doing so is sometimes a matter of several days' research ~ not a semi-instantaneous computer search.

     > please consider making a donation of $15 to our cemetery to cover the cost of your search. Whether we can confirm the location of a particular grave or not, the research takes valuable staff time. And, thus, all donations that help cover this cost are much appreciated.