Watch a free Collection Close-Ups webinar recording for this collection, in which the NYG&B team explains what you can find and how you can search it.
This collection consists of a searchable index of the interred at Danby Rural Cemetery, an active cemetery in Tompkins County, New York. It includes individuals with dates of death from the early 19th century through 1951. In addition to a searchable index of names, this rich dataset includes searchable metadata for new and old plot locations, plot purchase information and veteran status of the interred as recorded by Cemetery historians and custodians. The dataset also includes available information from the Tompkins County, New York "Genweb" site for the Danby Rural Cemetery, a volunteer effort that includes recording of gravestone inscriptions up through the mid-1950s.
Learn more about the present day volunteer board for the cemetery in our piece, Preservation and Volunteer Insights with the Danby Rural Cemetery Board.
Details for Graves without Names
NYG&B collection searches are largely powered by names. However, the Danby Rural Cemetery also includes important historical information for burials without names—either because there is no headstone, or because the existing headstone is unmarked or illegible. We have created a table listing these unnamed graves, sorted by current cemetery row, plot and gravestone. We have included all available details about each of these unnamed graves to facilitate in-depth searches (e.g., first names if legible, purchaser and purchase price). We have excluded plots with no gravestone and no information from any source about who might be buried there. Our assumption is that no one has (yet) been buried in these plots.
In a few instances, the name of the interred was able to be determined despite its being illegible or unavailable on the headstone using information that was available from sources other than a visual inspection of the cemetery. We have not included these graves in the table, because they can be found via the NYG&B search engine.
This collection was preserved and made available online through the NYG&B's Digitize New York initiative.