Exploring Almost Forgotten Gravesites in the Great State of Ohio

Dedicated to cemetery preservation in the great state of Ohio


"A cemetery may be considered as abandoned when all or practically all of the bodies have been Removed therefrom and no bodies have been buried therein for a great many years, and the cemetery has been so long neglected as entirely to lose its identity as such, and is no longer known, recognized and respected by the public as a cemetery. 1953 OAG 2978."
Showing posts with label Veterans Graves Registrations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Veterans Graves Registrations. Show all posts

Friday, December 1, 2023

Re-visiting some online Ohio W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps (AKA Veterans Graves Registration) and analyzing their format from one county to the next.

Sharing some examples of various arrangements of W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps posted online from a sampling of Ohio Counties.:

Belmont County's W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps.:

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Coshocton County's W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps.: 

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Hamilton County Recorder's Office W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps.:

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Knox County W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps - a direct link after taking a few "clicks" in the appropriate categories on the website of the Tax Map & G.I.S. Department to arrive at this link below with the maps in .pdf format.).:

https://co.knox.oh.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Cemetery-Maps.pdf

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Union County Records Center and Archives - named as Veterans Grave Maps which are the same as the W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps.:


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Williams County W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps (AKA Veterans Graves Registration) & History.:

The first link is for Williams County Veterans Graves Registration & History.  


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Dashboard:

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Originally in Ohio when these maps were created which was during the years of the Great Depression when the W.P.A. program was operational, one copy of the maps was placed at the Recorder's office for safe keeping.  

As we know now these maps, that are mostly found in hardbound books in a large size, need to be properly scanned and saved in a format such as .PDF; which I'm finding is quite often used.  

After the scanning is done, the images of the map pages are saved and offered to the public online in one format or another which varies from county to county.  
If these cemetery plat maps end up in a county archives or even at a county library then the possibility goes down, unforunately, that they will be posted online for the public's use.  
Thus, the Tax Map and the G.I.S. Departments more recently are the ones that offer these types of maps than an Engineer's Department. 
I'm learning that the most likely places in the county government that make sense to post them is right on their own websites if they have the resources available for them to do so (staffing and funding problems are often cited as reasons that hamper getting the job done), however, it may take some instructions for which categories are needed to access first (could be more than one) for a researcher to "work their way through" using their website in order to actually find them.

The Veterans Graves Registration / W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps  posted online are now I'm finding mostly at Tax Map / G.I.S. departments and in various formats (mostly saved as .PDF documents) ranging from a simple single PDF document containing all of the county's cemetery map pages to the more complex format presentations such as those offered by Williams County.  

So it is that we find that Ohio's counties are not following one set format for how these cemetery plat maps are arranged and presented on their websites.  However, a researcher can learn to adapt from one county to another if there are good instructions provided on the website that helps them navigate to the right place to bring up the map images to view and save them. 

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Friday, January 20, 2023

Six more historical news stories have been added to the "Ohio Cemeteries - WPA - Miscellaneous" Collection on Flickr.

 Six more news stories have been added to "Ohio Cemeteries - WPA Miscellaneous" collection on Flickr. 

A link for this collection is shown on the right sidebar of the blog. 

This collection is a "work in progress"!

Additional historical accounts will surely be discovered. 

Untold numbers of unemployed people found meaningful work by recording veteran burials and documenting them in map form, by creating individual veterans grave registration cards, and for some by conducting in-person surveys during the 1930s - the years of the Great Depression when unemployment was at an all time high. 

Reflecting on the "WPA" - Works Progress Administration program, I feel it is safe to say that it left a legacy all its own benefitting many searching for veterans burials in states like Ohio.  The six newspaper stories are shown below.  

The website NewspaperArchive was referenced for these stories.: 

OHIO CEMETERIES - WPA - MISCELLANEOUS.:







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HAMILTON COUNTY:

Cemetery Locations

Cemetery records listing burial locations of military veterans are available through the Recorder’s Office.

Veterans who were known at the time (up to 1939) were catalogued as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project.

Each cemetery has three parts to its record: 

1) An introductory card stating the exact name, date of establishment and relevant veteran’s information;

2) an information card containing an alphabetical index of all veterans buried in the cemetery, the war they served in and a burial plot locator number;

and 3) a plat map indicating the location of every burial plot within the cemetery so you can determine exactly where a veteran is buried.

After the WPA project, veteran’s burial records were obtained through a variety of sources until the 1980’s when these records came to be handled by the Ohio Department of Vital Statistics. Since then, they have provided typewritten indices on a regular basis listing deceased veterans and their burial cemetery. These records can only be accessed from microfilm tapes at the Recorder’s Office and are not currently available over the Internet.

Below is the list of cemeteries that were catalogued by the WPA with their corresponding page numbers and maps. Click the link in the “Plat Image Link” column to view the plat.

Included in this listing is a special section that documents Jewish Cemeteries.

Memorial Plaque.:

There are 244 Veteran burials in Hamilton County for which the exact grave location is unknown. Located in Spring Grove Cemetery is a plaque honoring them. For the list of these veterans’ names, see Page 581-582 of the Spring Grove Cemetery plats.

Click letter to move to that part of the cemetery list.

 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Z

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UNION COUNTY:

In 1933, the American Legion adopted a National Graves Registration Plan and three years later, passed a resolution that funding and labor should be provided to carry out the project by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The purpose of the project was to identify and document the burial location of every American who served their country in the military.

In 1938, the Ohio American Legion and the Ohio Adjutant General applied and obtained approval for funding through the WPA to conduct a state-wide Veterans Graves Registration Project.

The first step in the project was to identify the location of cemeteries throughout the county.

Once a cemetery was identified and located, surveyors were sent to measure the grounds and map the cemetery.

After field crews checked and then other project employees verified a veteran’s presence in the cemetery the location of the veteran’s grave was added to the cemetery plot map.

In the spring of 1939 the project was completed and afterwards the Ohio General Assembly required the county recorders in each county to maintain and update a list “for the registration of the graves of all persons who were honorably discharged” from military service.

The corresponding Veterans' Burial Cards can be found here: Veterans' Burial Records

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WILLIAMS COUNTY RECORDER:

Veteran’s Graves Registration

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

When the Great Depression hit the United States in 1929, the American economy hit rock bottom. The value of the dollar became nearly worthless and millions of Americans lost their jobs. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced “The New Deal,” a series of new programs designed to pick America back up on to its feet and get the economy moving again. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was one of those programs.

Initially designed to fund the building and improvement of America’s infrastructure, it also funded Veterans Graves Registration, the arts, history, and culture of America. In short, the WPA employed out-of-work Americans who were certified by local agencies as meeting certain qualifications.

Job & Industrial Growth:

The WPA was born in 1935 with an initial appropriation of $4.88 billion dollars from the Emergency Relief Fund. In 1939, the WPA was renamed the Works Projects Administration. Over it’s eight years in existence, the WPA employed approximately 8.5 million Americans, and spent a total of $11 billion dollars. It remains today as the most vigorous attempt in history to stimulate the U.S economy. The WPA was responsible for building structures; it paved 651,000 miles of road, built 78,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 800 airports. 

Humanities Projects:

The WPA funded some programs in the humanities including:

  • Federal Arts Project
  • Federal Theatre Project
  • Federal Writers Project
  • Historical Records Survey (HRS)
  • National Health Survey

 Veteran’s Grave Registration Program:

Locally the WPA funded a Veteran’s Grave Registration program. WPA workers would visit every cemetery in Williams County, map out the cemetery and provide locations of each Veteran’s gravesite. 

This information does not provide veteran’s identification, simply identifies where the veteran is buried in each cemetery and which war they served in. This information was compiled in 1940 and therefore, does not include any information after that date. The records from this project are compiled by Township.

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ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:

THE END OF AN ERA: THE WPA YEARS IN OHIO – OHIO MEMORY

https://ohiomemory.ohiohistory.org/archives/3362

HISTORY WEBSITE

https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/works-progress-administration

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