My facility with burial ledger transcription is improving. Today I did an entire page—57 entries. It doesn’t sound like much but a lot of time is eaten up with deciphering handwriting, and manipulating an oversized image on my desktop while navigating a very wide spreadsheet on my laptop. Plus there is that nagging case of desk elbow. So one afternoon with a 20 minute break is a new land speed record, and I didn’t even go down any rabbit holes today, like city directories and death notices to verify name spellings.

Page three listed the first Gettysburg casualty, and another soldier who died of his wound in New York. As usual, many babies and small children succumbing to malnutrition, cholera, and childhood diseases. Two women committed suicide. Two German men in their 50s died of delirium tremens, one at the Relay House in Maryland.

Last weekend, in anticipation of a much-needed long walk, which we took at the cemetery, I sorted some of the data into burials grouped by lot number. I realized I could use Green-Wood’s Civil War and WWI veterans bios pages to search for lot numbers; any matching numbers in the listings there would also include section names, so I could at least correlate some of the lot numbers to sections. I had even better luck by searching death dates and names at Billiongraves dot com, which I have otherwise tried to avoid. But those workarounds indeed worked, at least in theory.

On the ground, the lot number signage is so minimal within sections that I gave up after trying to find two with no luck. Lots can be large and what I really need is a more detailed burial map, which can only be accessed in the [still closed to visitors] cemetery office. Moreover, I get the impression that the numbering system may have been revised at some point. But the grounds people have to know where these people are, so there must be a way.

What I’m noticing, however, is that many people in the records, so far, were interred in the same lots, especially 4196. And of those, a number were removed and reinterred elsewhere in the cemetery. I would like to learn more about the history of the cemetery, and if this was a public lot. Most of the burials took place within a day or two of death, and this was high summer, which leads me to wonder if the removed burials were first put here until family or church-owned plots were could be acquired. Not only that, but the cemetery was very busy, with over 20 burials on July 1 and over the next week and a half, between 10-15 burials a day.

I need to get back in touch with Jeff Richman, the historian, with the hope he can answer these questions about usage. Meanwhile I still have had no response from the archivist about the confusing ditto marks in the ledger. Perhaps it’s time to crowdsource help on Archivist Twitter.