Tidbits of information
Many burial certificates were purchased by area residents from local funeral homes or burial associations. These were usually only good through the funeral home or association that sold them. Those certificates sold during the 1960s and 1970s indicated you were a member of the association and were usually in the amount of $200 and cost the member about $10 per year.
These may have been a precursor to the "Perpetual Care" certificates one can get these days from rural cemetery associations- your "guarantee" that by paying the appropriate fees the grave will be cared for (mowing, etc).
CEMETERY AND MORTUARY RECORDS (Part 1 of 2)
by Brian Mavrogeorge, Senior Development
Manager
The Learning
Company <bmavrogeorge@palladium.net>
Americans rely heavily on the censuses for family group information.
But when searching for children or women who lived prior to 1900 in the
United States, these records are not reliable. Infant mortality was high,
and children who were born and died between census enumerations don't appear
on the census. If you are looking for a woman in the U.S. who died before
the 1850 federal census enumeration, the only information you'll find under
her own name might be on her tombstone or in a cemetery
card file. Tombstone inscriptions, cemetery records, or undertaker
records might be the only tangible evidence of these lives. The Family
Tutor for Basic Genealogy Records <http://www.uftree.com>, by Johni
Cerny, offers this advice.
Start your cemetery search by finding the names and addresses of churches in areas where your ancestor may have died. The National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution has a Web site for locating cemeteries: <http://www.sar.org/geneal/cemtmaps.htm>.
Churches with affiliated burial grounds usually kept records of interments
in their ecclesiastical registers (sometimes called "Sexton's Books").
The local minister might be able to tell you where these registers are
now -- in the original meetinghouse, a
central church archive, in the possession of the heirs of the then-presiding
minister, or at the office of the current minister. Also, thousands of
church burial registers have been microfilmed and can be found in genealogical
collections, or at the LDS Family History Library and Family History Centers.
Where to write for info about a burial in any national cemetery system
Executive Communications and Public Affairs Service (402B)
National Cemetery System
Department of Veterans Affairs
810 Vermont Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20420
There is no charge for the lookup and reply.
You need to report the following, if known.
Full name
Birth date and place
Death date and location
State entered service from
Oklahoma has the
Fort Gibson National Cemetery
Route 2, Box 47
1423 Cemetery Road
Fort Gibson, OK 74434
Phone: 918-478-2334