Q: I’ve been trying to find more about the low wooden structures built over some graves in mostly (or only?) Southern cemeteries.
A: Grave houses, also called a grave shelters, were common in the South, especially Appalachian areas, to protect loved ones’ graves from the elements and grave robbers. They usually resemble small houses with peaked roofs, and could be made of logs, lumber, stones or brick. Some grave houses were open sided, like the one in this Melungeon cemetery.
Sometimes a single house may have sheltered more than one grave, such as the Airmount Grave Shelter, built in 1853 in the Airmount Cemetery near Thomasville, Ala.
According to Tennessee GenWeb, a grave house is different from a mausoleum: “The grave house is built over an ‘in earth’ interment, while in the mausoleum the bodies are above ground, often being placed in a alcove in the walls.”
Answer provided by Diane Haddad
Q. My grandma once told me a gravestone facing the opposite way of all the others in the cemetery indicates that person committed suicide. Is this true?
A: Cemeteries follow different traditions, but if a person who committed suicide were to be ostracized after death, it’s more likely that the body would be buried apart from others. According to the Association for Gravestone Studies, the north side of a cemetery was often considered less desirable, so suicides might be buried there along with paupers, slaves, members of minority religious sects and the unidentified deceased. Suicides also were sometimes buried upside-down, with the head vertically below the feet, as a post-mortem punishment; this required considerably deeper digging and, of course, is impossible to check without excavation.
Rather than a suicide, you might find that someone buried the opposite way is actually a minister. Many church graveyards were laid out east-west, with the head at the western end of the grave, to be facing the risen Christ on Judgment Day. But the minister was sometimes buried with his head at the eastern end of his grave so he’d be facing his flock at the time of Resurrection.
The rural cemetery movement, which began in the 1830s, diminished the role of church-administrated cemeteries and made cemeteries a fashionable place for recreation. These parklike cemeteries placed a high emphasis on landscape and design and might arrange their headstones to fit the contour of the terrain, following up and down hills or taking advantage of attractive vistas, rather than adhering to a strict east-west orientation.
Answer provided by David A. Fryxell
Q. I discovered an abandoned cemetery in Iredell County, NC. I was able to make sure the cemetery will be preserved despite plans to build homes on the site. Since the cemetery is in a gated community, what rights do relatives have to visit the graves?
A: Although North Carolina already had a bill in place governing cemeteries (including abandoned ones), the legislature passed Article 12 in February 2007 to clarify issues regarding abandoned and neglected cemeteries. Three clauses are of special interest to genealogists:
- 65-91: This allows any person or organization to donate up to $5,000 to the clerk of the county’s superior court to maintain the cemetery or a specific grave.
- 65-102 and 65-103: These clauses specify the conditions under which you may enter an abandoned or neglected cemetery with or without permission of the property owner. If you have consent and you’re a descendant of a person whose remains you believe to be interred there, or a descendant’s designee, or another person with a “special interest in the grave or abandoned public cemetery,” you may enter private property to “discover, restore, maintain, or visit a grave or abandoned public cemetery.”
If you don’t have consent from the property owner but can prove you meet the criteria above, you can petition the county court for an order to enter the property for the stated purposes. You must show the visit wouldn’t unreasonably interfere with landowner’s enjoyment of his property.
The clerk also can specify restrictions on visits, such as the dates and hours you may enter the property, or the route you must take when entering and exiting. To learn more about these North Carolina laws, see Chapter 65 here.
Many states have similar laws governing access to cemeteries on private property. Learn about them by searching the legislature’s website or contacting your state representative.
Answer provided by Nancy Hendrickson. From the November 2007 issue of Family Tree Magazine.
Q. What happens to the uprooted graves and crypts in hurricane-ravaged cemeteries?
A: Your question is actually twofold: What happens to the physical markers of a grave when a hurricane hits and what happens to the human remains? Handling of displaced markers, such as monuments and headstones, depends on the cemetery. Some cemeteries work diligently to recover, repair and reset them. Other cemeteries haven’t done much to fix the devastation left by recent storms.
As for human remains, that involves to a degree the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state and local health departments and other groups. Ryan M. Seidemann, assistant attorney general for the Louisiana Department of Justice and attorney for the Louisiana Cemetery Board, says FEMA undertook a survey of cemeteries in southern Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They estimated damage at around 1,500 graves, but other estimates are lower.
When remains were recovered, Seidemann says, “minimal forensic anthropological analyses were conducted on the unearthed remains, and archaeological/historical analyses were conducted on what coffins were available [at a given time]. FEMA shipped the remains back to the parishes they thought they originated from.”
Some cemeteries have reburied the remains; others can’t afford it. “We have approached FEMA on several occasions to request reburial funding and more comprehensive identification analyses,” Seidemann says, “but they have pointed us to regulations that restrict them from doing DNA analysis or for paying for reburial in anything but public cemeteries.” The problem: Many of the remains came from private cemeteries.
Seidemann and the Louisiana Cemetery Board are looking for solutions. “We are concerned that relatives will eventually come looking for these folks and that it would be a disservice to them, not to mention disrespectful, for us to allow for reburial without some attempt to identify who these folks are. We firmly believe that these folks should go back into cemeteries as close to where they originated as possible.” FEMA has made it clear identifying and reburying bodies is a state responsibility.
If any good comes from this, it will be from changes in the laws. “Our legislature is trying to ensure that such problems do not happen again,” says Seidemann.
Answer provided by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack. From the July 2007 issue of Family Tree Magazine.
Related Reads
A version of this article was posted online in October 2020. Last updated: October 2025
