Out of respect for the dead, a number of states have passed laws allowing towns to acquire abandoned cemeteries if legal owners and heirs can’t be found. The laws don’t require that the cemeteries be cleaned up, but the hope is that with town ownership, volunteers will get involved for the actual clean-up.
However, it’s been found that there are unique issues dealing with establishing ownership of these places. For one thing, cemeteries don’t show up on historic tax rolls, which left little reason for the local governments to keep track of them…
Following are exceprts from an interesting AP article found in the July 5, 2010 edition of the Deseret News.
Last year, Connecticut joined a number of states that have enacted laws that let towns
acquire abandoned cemeteries if they cannot find the legal owners or heirs and if no burials have taken place for generations.
But the new law only allows for the acquisitions and cleanups. It doesn’t require towns to do so or allocate any money to pay for the work.
…
Many abandoned cemeteries are the remnants of family farmstead burial grounds. Some were burial grounds for slaves and their descendants, who were segregated from whites even in death. Others are former churchyards abandoned when the churches disbanded or the last sexton died. Some were in frontier territories that were left behind as pioneers moved on…
I understand your issue, as I operate environmentally friendly cemeteries for pets & humans. What we do is map traditional cemeteries for the locations of the tombstones and what information is on them. This information is stored in our database against this location and volunteers add the life story, photos, and the Family Tree.
By storing this information and making it available it adds value to the sites as historical records, ie history as told by the individual.
We offer this service free to anyone and as our records increase we are effectively providing a reason for council to preserve these sites.
I am trying to build an IPhone app so that this information is available from a mobile phone, which means that it can be accessed by standing next to the site.