Cemetery records for a small volunteer board: lots, burials and sales, with no internet
Short answer: keep three lists. Lots, the burials in each lot, and one row for each lot sale or payment. Open a lot and you see who owns it and who is buried there; search a name and you find the lot. It works on a laptop with no internet, it is free to start, and nobody has to hire a consultant. Read where this is honest before you start.
Jennifer Bryce, who helps keep the records for the Danby Rural Cemetery in New York, put the problem in one sentence: “There is no simple software package to help rural cemeteries just organize the mapping sales and tracking of lots.” The article goes on to say that cemeteries usually have to work with consultants, at a cost Danby Rural cannot afford (NYG&B, 2024, read 4 November 2026). So she and Sharon Boda typed the handwritten ledgers from the 1870s into a spreadsheet and checked them against the old plot maps.
A spreadsheet is a good start. The trouble comes later: one lot holds several burials, one family buys more than one lot, and the person who knew which tab meant what steps down from the board.
How the lists fit together
| List | What one row is | Points at |
|---|---|---|
| Lots | One lot: section, lot number, number of graves, owner, owner's address, perpetual care yes or no, notes | |
| Burials | One person: name, born, died, date buried, grave within the lot, the ledger and page it came from, notes | A lot |
| Sales and payments | One sale or payment: date, buyer, amount, what it was for (lot, opening a grave, care fund), receipt number | A lot |
Keeping the ledger and page on each burial matters more than it looks. When a family writes asking where great-grandmother is, you can say where the answer came from. When two old ledgers disagree, filter the burials to one ledger and compare.
Records that live on the laptop
Bionic Forms builds a small app from a spreadsheet or a sentence, such as “keep our cemetery's lots, who is buried in each one, and every lot sale”. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy on the computer. With no connection at all you can:
- Type up the old ledgers at the kitchen table, one burial at a time.
- Attach photos of a headstone, a ledger page or a scanned plot map to the record it belongs to (files on records).
- Print a lot's record for a family or the town clerk (how printing works).
- Search and sort: every burial with one surname, every lot in Section B, every lot with no owner on file.
When the laptop finds a connection again, the changes go up by themselves, so a second board member sees the same records. Every change is kept with who made it and when (how history works), which helps when three volunteers take turns.
What it costs
Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app, with no card. A rural cemetery with a thousand burials and a few hundred lots fits well inside that. If you already have the spreadsheet, drop it on our home page and each sheet comes in as its own list.
Where this is honest
- It does not draw a plot map. A lot is a row with a section and a number. You can attach a scan of your plot map as a picture, but nothing on screen draws the rows of graves. Our map view places street addresses, not graves.
- No offline phone app yet. Offline is the desktop app only. On a phone, ours runs in the browser and needs a signal, so a walk round the grounds is still paper or photos, typed up later.
- No public search page for families. The records are for the board. You can download any list as a spreadsheet to share.
- Set it up while you have a connection. The AI that builds the app runs on our server. Using it afterwards does not need one.
- We are small and pre-launch. We say plainly which parts are not finished, and your data can always be exported again.
Build it now. The box already says what this page is about. Change it if you like.
About 25 seconds. No signup to see the result.
Already keep a spreadsheet? Drop it on the home page instead.
Or open the live demo first. No email.
Rather not do it yourself? Tell us what you track and we will build a working version and show you. No fee.
More: keeping a register and photos on records, or tree service records.