Yesterday I completed transcribing the burial records for Green-Wood Cemetery. By the end I’d managed to improve my time from four hours per page to two. Interesting entries included two children killed by gunshot wounds, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan. I’m curious as to whether the child in the city—a five year-old girl—was caught in crossfire during the Draft Riot, which was taking place when she was killed. Unless I can find an notice in the newspaper about it, it’s unlikely I’ll ever find out.

There were also two soldiers killed at Gettysburg. But it seems that those casualties were either buried there or were shipped up later in July if not sometime after, beyond the range of the records I have.

I have flagged names and other details that were hard to read for further investigation and will use other sources like directories, municipal death records and death notices to make corrections. I’ve also discovered that the cemetery’s burial records do include some of those in the registers, despite the early date. It’s very inconsistent. Perhaps it was a project someone began and then abandoned. I’ve also found that commercial sites have been helpful for some of these details, as well as locating the lots in the cemetery sections. Of course, I have the information but the information about where the lots are within the sections are another story, and the cemetery’s signage is very inconsistent as well. I also need to confirm how many of the burials with lot but not grave numbers, which are numerous, are in private/family plots. I’ve also flagged records that list an unusual cause of death, perhaps from an accident. On one of the previous sheets I transcribed, there were several listed as “casualty,” including a child. I have not been able to find news of any accident in the city that might have caused those deaths.

A few interesting things I’ve noticed:

• Many of these burials are in the same lots, which were probably public lots.
• A sizable number of people buried in these lots were later moved to what must have been private lots or family plots.
• One lot—448—seems to have been a designated temporary lot. In every case the number was written in ink next to the deceased’s name in the ledger and the location data left blank until a later date, at which time it was pencilled in, along with the date of reburial.
• Without an accurate count yet, I think it’s safe to say that about 75% of the burials at this time were children under 10. Most died from childhood diseases and other conditions that today could be treated. These include marasmus, which would now be termed “failure to thrive,” and was most likely a problem metabolizing nutrients; cholera infantum (which, unlike cholera, is not contagious) and similar enteric diseases that were perhaps all the same disease but diagnosed differently; hydrocephalus; and typhus. Given the sample of 347 deaths, the number of stillbirths and premature births was quite surprising. I’d like to know if the enteric diseases were more common in the summer than other months, but unfortunately the data set I was able to get can’t tell me that.

With this first step complete, the bulk of the project is just beginning. I have learned a lot already, and most importantly I’ve discovered that there are some formidable obstacles in my way, most caused by the pandemic and my inability to access the records at the cemetery. The archivist has not responded to any of my emails and I’m reluctant to call him as a result.

I know that Green-Wood just got a major grant to digitize all of these records and make them searchable. That is a huge undertaking, and I’m sure will take years. I believe this is what he’s been working on since last summer.

NYCDH Week just concluded and I took a number of workshops that were very useful, including one on a platform called Fair Copy. It is, essentially, a TEI word processor. A TEI markup of ledger or portion of a ledger is something I’d wanted to include in my project as part of the proof-of-concept. Now that I have a Fair Copy account I may be able to do that, although it would require formatting one of the image files to comply with what I learned in another workshop, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). I don’t know if this is something I can do on my own. (Fortunately, I’ve just discovered a workshop covering this very thing on GitHub!) Otherwise, if I include this sample treatment in my project, I’ll need to do the markup “by hand.”

Immediate next steps (not necessarily in this order):

• Read the cemetery’s regulation and policy books from the period. These provide information such as costs, procedures, etc. There is also a history of the cemetery produced mainly for tourists that I’ll read. Numerous copies are digitized and available on archive.org and other library sites.
• Standardize and correct any questionable data in the spread sheet
• Locate section numbers for as many of the lot numbers as possible
• Play with it to see what I can see
• Choose a portion of the records to use for biographical research (home addresses, occupations, cause of death, etc.).
• Choose another portion for site surveys. Some of these records may overlap with those for biographical research, such as people buried in family lots or mausoleums, and others with an unusual cause of death, such as those killed in the riots.

Not-so-immediate next steps:

• Conduct site surveys. Hope against hope that by then I will be able to access the cemetery’s more detailed burial maps. I will use the DEBS standard to record data and rent a GPS receiver for the surveys.
• Determine which platform(s) and methods I will be using to present the project.

Even further next steps will get into the technical work, some of which I can do easily and some of which will pose a challenge:

• Locating addresses on georeferenced period maps of Manhattan and Brooklyn
• Locating burials on a georeferenced map of the cemetery
• Creating map layers for both to enable sorting to visualize data like age and cause of death
• Network analysis. Given that the time span for these records is only three weeks, I don’t think extensive network analysis for something like extended family relationships is relevant.  Married women, for instance, were often buried with their husbands’ families, not in their own family plots, so those relationships would be traceable across a cemetery. However, there are so few adult married women in the sample that it wouldn’t be a useful visualization. Nevertheless, I think the project should include an example, since it intends to show what can be learned from standardized cemetery data analyzed with open-source software. An analysis might work for people buried in private lots and mausoleums who were from families that had some degree of wealth. It would be interesting to see who, among these people, had mutual connections to particular church congregations or other social groups. This would require more extensive biographical research.