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Artifact of the Month – Oak
Mound Cemetery Ledgers
This month’s
featured selection is an important collection of hand-written
ledgers from Healdsburg’s Oak Mound Cemetery. Added to the
Healdsburg City archives in the early 1960s, it is believed that
these volumes were acquired by Museum founder and former city clerk,
Edwin Langhart. They had never been formally accessioned into the
Museum collection. Dating from 1864-1958, these documents contain
the burial and plot sales records that were kept by the owners of
the cemetery during these years. The collection consists of 24
books of varying sizes and shapes, ranging from slim
red-leather-bound journals of the 1880s to the 4” x 2.4”
spiral-bound notebooks of the 1940s. They are in fair condition.
Since ownership of the cemetery has been held by a succession of
private owners, these records had not been kept in a tidy
bookkeeping system. Each owner developed his or her own system (and
abbreviations!) for keeping track of burials. Very few of the
notebooks contained a name index and many of the entries were barely
legible, penciled jottings. Obviously none of the volumes were
computerized, but worse, none of them were even typed.
All of the
information contained in these journals was carefully extracted by
(the late) Healdsburg Museum Volunteer Jenny Allen, and organized
and typed into a searchable computerized index. It was a monumental
effort which took over a year to complete in 2004-2005. Jenny’s
aunt, Kay Schmidt Robinson, still a pivotal Museum volunteer, helped
set up the data fields in an Excel spreadsheet to provide a listing
for last name, first name, date of death, date of burial, name of
cemetery addition, block #, section #, row #, lot/tier # and grave
#. As Jenny struggled to recover her health from a series of
operations and medical procedures, she typed up the records at home
as a kind of physical therapy. Jennifer Johannsen Allen died August
14, 2005 at age 38 and is now buried in Oak Mound Cemetery. We are
grateful to Jenny and appreciative that Kay completed the work to
finish Jenny’s legacy.
Before the efforts of Jenny and Kay, this data was
virtually unavailable to genealogical researchers and other
concerned individuals (!). The current owners of the cemetery
had records only for burials dating from the mid-1960s. At the
Museum we relied on handwritten cemetery index cards which had been
copied from a few of the early burial records. The only other source
was a publication of the Sonoma County Genealogical Society that was
based on gravestone transcriptions up to 1926. |
