Washington opens online burial search

The city of Washington announced an online database of burial records last week, making previously hard-to-get cemetery records available to the public virtually.

“All our records were just kept at the cemetery office, so if somebody was specifically looking for relatives, doing some genealogy, a lot of times they wouldn’t be able to find it online,” Cemetery Sexton Nick Duvall said. “They would have to either call me or come to the cemetery to get that information, so now some of that … is available to them online.”

The database, available through the city’s website, allows users to search by name, birth, death or burial date, and veteran status. It also contains info on funeral homes, details on military service and the burial location.

For now, the records only include those buried at Elm Grove.

“That’s where the majority of our burials are now, it has more people in it, that’s the reason we did Elm Grove first,” he said.

Duvall said plans were in motion to get Woodlawn records online, but that it would likely take a few years.

“It’s something I work on in the winter time when we don’t have other stuff to do, so it depends,” he said. “I would be hopeful that in the next couple years we get it up there, but it’s hard to say.”

Elm Grove’s data set alone was 15 years in the making, with cemetery staff mostly entering records as they came across them.

“At Elm Grove, the first burial was in 1887, and there’s more than 12,000 people buried out here, so there’s a lot of records,” Duvall said. “It’s been in the making ever since we’ve had the software, that was our goal, we just hadn’t gotten enough information in there to where we felt we could put it online.”

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