Sexton Records
What is a sexton? An employee or officer of a church who is responsible for keeping records of those buried in the cemetery, for the care and upkeep of church property and sometimes for ringing bells and digging graves
. The hard part can be finding existing records for cemeteries without an office. For cemeteries still accepting burials there will often be a sign with contact information. If no contact information or office listed, then ask a nearby Funeral Home, business (based on my persional experience, even a tractor supply, or barber shop could have the records), or any neighbor close to the cemetery might know who has the original sexton records. Read more info at Teach Me Genealogy - What is a Sexton?.
USGenWeb has an Allen County Tombstone Transcription Project.
March 1, 2023 post by Dead Fred's Genealogy Photo Archive on Facebook:
Digging Graves as a Hobby (1916) This picture is of Mrs. Josephine Smith, aged 84 at the time, whose hobby was digging graves. Part of a collection of images taken by Jim Fitzpatrick called 'Drouin town and rural life during World War II". Drouin was a typical little farming town with around 1,100 people.
This photo is actually from 1944, posted as Josephine Smith digging a grave at the Drouin Cemetery, Victoria [1] [picture] [born in 1916] in the Drouin town and rural life during World War II [picture]collection also posted on flickr.com by the National Library of Australia with a second photo Josephine Smith digging a grave at the Drouin Cemetery, Victoria, [2] [picture].
Josephine Smith digging a grave at the Drouin Cemetery, Victoria, [2] on flickr, Fitzpatrick, Jim, 1916- Title devised by cataloguer from caption on verso.; Condition: Good.; Part of the collection: Drouin town and rural life during World War II.; "U429/84. Meet Mrs. Josephine Smith, aged 84, whose hobby is digging graves. She lives in Drouin, a typical little farming town (1100 people), in southern Australia, 60 miles out of the Victorian capital, Melbourne. ..."--Printed on label.; Accompanied by two pages of notes.; Also available in an electronic version via the Internet at: nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an24219398.
September 11, 2023 post by the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana on Facebook:
An interesting story about a cemetery in Illinois where volunteers use modern technology to map gravesites in an 1866 cemetery. Would be nice if every local cemetery grave site was similarly cleaned up and mapped.
"“Everything” meant cleaning up the neighboring treeline, restoring broken headstones, digging up and/or stabilizing headstones and mapping graves."
For St. Mary's Cemetery Champaign, Illinois, Volunteers, engineers, students working together to map what lies beneath St. Mary's Cemetery Luke Taylor, September 8, 2023 The News-Gazette.