Hallowed ground for genealogists: tips to help with cemetery searches

By KAYE FORD Co-Director

Occasionally, you’ll luck out and find a cemetery that has provided a searchable database of their burials online. One such cemetery is the St. Joseph New Cemetery located in Cincinnati, Ohio (https://www. stjoenew.com/ page/genealogy). This database allows you to search burial records by first and last name, which is helpful. Until you’re searching for John Doyle, of which there are 27. This specific database also provides the burial location within the cemetery (the section, the lot, the part, and the range). You can take those four pieces of information to search others buried in the same lot, just remove the first and last name from your search. In John Doyle’s lot, there are five burials: Doyle, his wife, and their three sons. This is the only marker at the site.

Other information provided is burial date, age, and parent’s names, if known. Catharine Doyle, above, was a Fitzgerald, who had an older brother, John. I searched for a John Fitzgerald, found one with parents James Fitzgerald and Mary Sullivan, and then did a search of John’s lot. This is what I found:

It turns out that James Fitzgerald and Mary Sullivan had divorced between 1857 and 1861, and Mary had remarried Cornelius Sullivan. These results have given me a lot more to explore in this family!

At HCHS, our volunteer Ben Clark has been working diligently entering names into a database of obituaries, scrapbooks, and old courthouse ledgers. He is nearing the end of this project and is at 79,000 names right now. Watch for it soon on our website! Once he finishes that project, he’s moving to entering names into our very own cemetery database. We hope that this will help people locate their ancestor here in Henry County. Keep making those connections!