Tombstone Tuesday: Rhode Island Cemetery Codes

Finding Rhode Island Cemeteries

Partial Former Listing of Westerly, RI Cemeteries (Wayback Machine)

Deciphering the Rhode Island Cemetery Codes

Organized by volunteers, the Rhode Island Cemetery Transcription Project and posted to RootsWeb, the information for the massive numbers of cemeteries, listed pages and pages of the letter/number codes, the "name" of the cemetery, the town and the street name followed by the number of the nearest telephone. (Did you know that telephone poles have numbers?

Partial Former Listing of Westerly, RI Cemeteries (Wayback Machine)

WY008 is the code for River Bend Cemetery in Westerly on Beach St. Note that the code is the first and last letter in the word Westerly.  Once users got the hang of using it, the listing for each known burial for the whole cemetery was alphabetized. In my surname notebook for BARBER, are pages of the names of the dead Barbers for Westerly. (No, I am not shredding that yet).

It is important to note that even "Lost" and "Removed" cemeteries have a designation.

Today, the index for the cemetery name, code and names are located in one PDF file are can be downloaded to your computer. Don't print it unless you have a LOT of paper in your printer. Currently it is 81 pages.

The great news is the GPS coordinates that are available in the new document. I have no idea how accurate that is however.

NEHGS holds a copy of the the index of the database, so if I type in the "Advanced Search" for Rhode Island Historic Cemetery Database and use the search terms Barber in the town of Westerly, I get 179 hits for persons named Barber buried there.

Stay tuned for there is an even better way... 

Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Database Index (Online database: AmericanAncestors.org, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2003), (Transcriptions by volunteers of Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project; index compiled by John Sterling. "Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Database Index," 2003).