Beginning date on cemetery gives me an Error 886

Question

I am working on my suggestions list and have had an Error 886 since Aug 2023.  I have sent a message to the person who created the cemetery category and no response.  The Mount Olivet Cemetery in Franklin, Maryland has a website that lists it's established date as 1854, but on Find A Grave there are over 1,300 graves listed with a death date prior to 1854.  What should I do to fix this?

Comments

For some other 19th-century cemeteries that include re-interments, the "start date" has been removed from the category infobox.

I don't believe there is any requirement for cemetery categories to have start and end dates. The dates are an option to help detect errors. If the inclusion of a date is throwing a lot of false errors, the logical solution is to remove the date.

Answer 1

Mount Olivet stated that their first burial was in 1854. Chances are he was buried somewhere else and was moved after Mount Olivet opened. There were several references of Civil War veterans being moved into and out of the cemetery. I know when we had a new local "garden" cemetery open a bunch of graves from the old city cemetery were moved there. If you contact the cemetery or local historical society they may be able to provide information on people whose graves were relocated. I would probably suggest marking the suggestion as false and put a research note stating that his remains were moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery.

Answer 2

After careful research, you should be able to mark the suggestion as false. It is likely that he was reinterred here later, as is the case for many individuals.

See: http://www.mountolivethistory.com/stories-in-stone-blog/archives/02-2021

Comments

It would be very helpful if the people that are going through and adding categories to profiles from certain cemeteries, either not add the category if the death was before the start date, OR make sure to check the suggestions the following week, so the rest of us that work on suggestions do not have to do this.  

Maybe another idea would be, before adding the categories to profiles, the person should check to see how many people are buried before the start date and determine if the start date is correct or not.

Suggestions for these categories have increased lately and the corrections, marking them false, etc falls to the projects and PMs that are not putting the categories on the profiles,

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I have found several profiles where 'Cemeterist' project members have added a category to a profile, which someone later removed, at least partially because of the suggestion, and then someone is adding it back.  

Instead of 'Cemeterist' adding the category to profiles without checking dates on profile, they should do as Natalie recommended in her post.

Answer 3

Sometimes people were buried in cemeteries that have no burial records before a particular date.

Do the Find a Grave records have photos of graves from before 1854? And are you sure as possible that the photos have been entered for the right cemetery?

If the cemetery website is only using burial records, not information that is on headstones, they could easily be wrong.

The cemetery that I am researching for a cemetery project has about 1475 graves, with names, the headstones don't always have birth dates, they do usually have death dates.

But the cemetery records for burials start in 1929 almost 100 years later than 1832 when it was created.

The headstones are often the only record of pre 1929 burials. Though there are other records of people who were buried there, sometimes on a death certificate, sometimes in family bibles or local newspapers.

In this particular cemetery the cemetery steward said during a conversation with me that additional corpses often but not always children were included in a grave for someone else if a grave had already been dug for the other person. Often because the family could not afford a headstone.

In that case it was common that the names of the additional corpses were not included on the headstone.

You don't need to fix the information on the cemetery website.

Though as others have said some people may have been re-interred after their burial somewhere else.

I would want to know how many people may have been re-interred.

Answer 4

Hi Judith.  I've had the same issue with the same cemetery (profile https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sponseller-13), and I can give you the name and e-mail address of the cemetery superintendent if you wish.  Just send me a private note.  He says he does have records of reinterments, and he seems to have personal knowledge of some families.  In my case there was no such record, although there were other family members there, and it looks as if a Find A Grave contributor probably created a memorial where there was no corresponding grave.

Edit:  I'm assuming you meant Frederick, MD.

Answer 5

Startdate in the cemetery CIB should be set as the earliest burial recorded. You'd have to ask Aleš, but I think it might be based on the Find a Grave burials. These are OFTEN not the date posted as the opening date on cemetery signs. So, I go to Find a Grave's memorial page for the cemetery, sort by oldest death date, and use that as the startdate in the CIB.

It is NOT the date the cemetery opened. Jeffrey Wall is correct in that there are re-interments from other places, and those persons often passed away before the cemetery was opened. And Ellen is also correct, those start and end dates are not required parameters.