Genealogists appreciate the card catalog that has been available for years at Dayton, Ohio's Woodland Cemetery. Each card gives a person's name, date of death and burial, and sometimes added details, such as the type of vault used. Of course, to view the cards you have always needed to travel to Dayton, find a cemetery employee with the time available to help you, and then look through the cards to find the information you want. Now all that is changing.
Thanks to collaboration by the Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum, the Montgomery County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, and the University of Dayton, the cemetery now has an online search engine that quickly finds entries in Woodland's entire file: 104,000 names. Best of all, you don't need to leave home to use it.
The database provides a wealth of information, including:
- Given name
- Surname
- Burial location (section, lot, and tier)
- Burial date
- Death date
- Age
- Birth place
- Funeral home
The database does not provide names of any relatives, however.
As I looked at various record entries, I did find a few with blank spaces for birth place, and a few had blanks for the age. However, most of the records contained all of the information.
The same web site also provides a wealth of information about the cemetery and a number of pictures. It even features a prominent link to the nearby Montgomery County Genealogical Society.
The Woodland Cemetery's web site is free and open to all. Donations are gladly accepted, however. Donated funds will be used to create a future mapping capability.
This is a great resource for genealogists, especially those who do not live near Dayton yet have ancestors who lived there. I wish that similar online resources were available for all cemeteries!
The online database for Dayton's Woodland Cemetery can be found at http://www.woodlandcemetery.org.
