#52 Ancestors 2023 Week 22 At the Cemetery: Green Mount

Green Mount Cemetery 

Like most genealogists, cemeteries are among my favorite places, and I’ve spent many happy hours walking or driving around, with a map if I’m lucky, searching for an elusive grave marker.  Lately, however, my cemetery trips have been curtailed by aging and surgery.  So I have been more dependent on the kindness of cemetery staff, always a key component of successful cemetery research.  I want to focus on the great work being done at Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery, always one of my favorite places, that has helped me find burials and build some family trees even though I haven’t been able to visit in person for some months. 

Green Mount, one of the earliest rural or garden cemeteries in the U.S., was opened in 1839, built on the picturesque estate of merchant Robert Oliver and designed by Benjamin Latrobe as  reflective space of shady avenues and beautiful gardens. 

Since its opening, Green Mount has become the final resting place of more than 65,000 souls including captains of industry, politicians, military leaders, artists, and even a presidential assassin, as well as ordinary Baltimoreans. Not to mention beautiful monuments and architecture. It was placed on the National Register in 1980. Since I was born in Baltimore and have many familial connections there, I have naturally found many relatives buried at Green Mount.

Green Mount’s records are not available online.  Thousands of interment cards and plot cards are stored in wooden cabinets inside the quaint stone tower of the gateway office shown in the picture above. For many years, obtaining the information on these cards required an in-person visit and/or extensive phone and mail correspondence with the patient and helpful staff as well as the payment of a small search fee. 

Recently, however, the cemetery has developed an online request system that has proven enormously helpful to a stuck-at-home or out-of-town researcher like me.  I can request online a search for someone I believe is buried at Green Mount and what information and photos I would like to have if the person is found in the records (interment card, plot card, plot photos, etc. ). The staff notifies me by email if the person is in the cemetery records and includes an invoice for the requested records.  I can pay the fees online and receive all the information digitally within a day or two. They have even done some cleaning on gravemarkers to give me the best possible image.

Here is a recent example of some successful online cemetery research at Green Mount, done when I was unable to travel to the cemetery. 

I knew from previous research that Joseph Dean Smith was buried at Green Mount and that his mother was most likely Mary Smith (I know, right?), whom I last found in Baltimore in the 1860 Census, with an approximate birth date. I could not find any death records for her. I also knew that Mary was not in the same Green Mount plot as her son, since I had already obtained that plot card.

So, I took a leap and asked Green Mount to search for Mary Dean Smith, (guessing on the maiden name because of her son’s name), born in Virginia around 1797, and dying sometime after 1860. Definitely a long shot, but they actually found her. She was buried in a different plot along with four of her daughters. The daughters were what actually confirmed this since I had asked to search for them as well. (Still working on how that sixth person is related, if at all.)

Green Mount let me know that there were gravemarkers in the plot and took pictures for me that revealed new information including Mary’s husband, Thomas, and parents, Joseph and Hannah Dean. Thank you to whomever ordered that very informative stone.

I hope that sometime in the not-too-distant future, I will be able to go check out these Smith family plots in person, but meanwhile, I am very grateful for staff at Green Mount that helped me obtain this information. 

For that matter, let me just give a long-overdue shout-out to the many staff members from the dozens of cemeteries that I have contacted over the years, in person, by mail, and over the phone.  They have graciously and patiently pored over records, made copies of records, drawn maps for me, taken photographs and even researched obituaries to help me find clues to the ancestors I have been looking for.

Thank you.