This file part of www.dodgejeffgen.com website

 

Oak Hill Cemetery Interment Forms

 

Index to Collection

 

A-C       D-G       H-J      K-L      M-P       Q-S       T-Z

 

14918 entries  /  More than one form used for some names  /  List does not include all those buried in cemetery

 

D/JCGS Inherits Oak Hill Cemetery Records

 

In May of 2006 Jeff Rammelt of Oak Hill Cemetery in Watertown contacted our webmaster, Ken Riedl, and asked him if our group would be interested in accepting some records from the Oak Hill Cemetery Association that they wanted to dispose of.  The positive response “YES” was shouted so loud that the echo can still be heard on quiet nights.

 

The records were delivered to the library -- all 20 boxes of them! 

 

All 20 mice-chewed boxes. 

 

Now to most people these records would have been looked at once and then thrown away. But not by genealogists!  Oh no!  There’s gold in them thar papers and I was asked to weed through them to judge just what was worth saving.

 

Now you ask anyone and they will tell you that one of my favorite things is wallowing in scrap paper.  I was delighted to be able to go through these papers and found a number of things that will prove to be very valuable for future researchers, including grave sales books going back to 1866, burial permits stretching back into the early 1890s, and general correspondence which deal with family history requests.  These materials are still being processed, but their potential as research aids is inestimable.

 

After going through the boxes on a Tuesday morning, I was able to winnow down the collection from 20 boxes to 6 boxes.  Lots of trash, yes, but once the chaff was separated from the wheat we were left with some excellent historical resources.

 

The burial permits and veterans death certificates are especially valuable and will need a great deal of processing before they will be ready for the public to paw through them.  But rest assured volunteers are already hard at work alphabetizing them and soon they will be ready to be unveiled.

 

We are very grateful to Oak Hill Cemetery and urge any other cemetery associations who might catch win of their act of generosity to consider depositing their old records which they no longer find useful with the DJCGS.  We’ll make a home for them.