Colorado Cemetery Project

Colorado has been a difficult place to pin down cemeteries and other burial locations. From the gold rush days burials took place in many locations, other than in community cemeteries. During the Pike’s Peak gold rush when wagons made their way across Kansas and Nebraska Territories, across seemingly endless prairies of limited resources, diseases, starvation and other tragic events requiring burials in remote areas along the trails. The expediencies of the search for gold and its extraction was hazardous, costing many lives in remote areas or places that would become ghost towns, the burial sites succumbing to nature over the harsh years.

 For one reason or another many of the single graves can still be identified today or locations given when they cannot. Many of the smaller burial sites have survived , yet today there are a large number of unmarked graves in them. No doubt markers were placed identifying individuals buried there, but again, they have deteriorated or disappeared. The cemetery project has located and identified a large number of the existing spots, largely through the records and publications that are available. Some 283 of these publications, plus microfilm, manuscripts and society newsletters have uncovered over 2,000 of the smaller, more remote burial sites. When aka names are included, the cemeteries listed total over 3,000 records. Through an “indexing” process of these sources, over 84,400 names were extracted and made available in a book, a CD-ROM and a WebSite. [See also Colorado Cemetery Index.]

 Each burial record includes the available information about location. Most have section/township/range information while a number of the cemeteries also have geographic positioning locaters and some have elevations shown. When plotted on Topo maps, that information is shown. There are additional directions to the burial sites, the information coming from the publications covering the sites. Probably most important is that each record (burial site) makes reference to the publications that have information about the site. This is the most comprehensive publication, to date, on Colorado cemeteries and burial sites.

Libraries that have this publication: http://www.columbinegenealogy.com/colocems.htm

 Donald R. Elliott

 Compiler