For articles on various aspects of the history of Holy Rood Cemetery, see Holy Rood Cemetery.
For profiles of some of the people buried in Holy Rood Cemetery, see Buried in Holy Rood.
Online Sources
As a first step it may be helpful to consult Holy Rood Cemetery’s Find A Grave page and list of interments (as entered by subscribers to date); or Holy Rood Cemetery Gravestone Transcriptions by David J. O’Connor.
It should be noted, however, that such lists are no substitute for the actual burial records of the cemetery, as the great majority of people buried in Holy Rood have no gravestones to be transcribed. (The number of gravestones in Holy Rood Cemetery is estimated to be between 2,161 and 2,550, but the number of recorded burials is 7,312.
Archival Sources
Holy Rood Cemetery was originally the Upper Grave Yard of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, D.C. (frequently abbreviated in the records as T.C.U.G.Y). The first burial was recorded April 22, 1833.
The burial records of the cemetery are preserved, together with all other sacramental registers of Holy Trinity Church, in the Special Collections Research Center at Lauinger Library, Georgetown University. (Although some of the Archives of Holy Trinity Church are available online, at the time of this writing the burial records could only be read at Special Collections.)
Before proceeding to the original records, it may be useful to check the spiral-bound index at Special Collections that gives cemetery section, lot numbers, and the page of the original entry in the old Holy Trinity lot book. (If a surname is not immediately to be found in the index, it should be remembered that transcription errors––Nevitt indexed as Meritt, for example––are to be expected, and that the entries and the index in the original records are the only reliable record.)
The Death Register of Holy Trinity Church is the original record of deaths and burials, but it does not show specific grave sites.
Lot Books––which record who is buried in which section and lot, the date the lot was purchased, and name and address of the purchaser––and the map of Holy Rood sections and lots reproduced below––are the only way to find a particular grave.
There are six volumes of original records in the Special Collections Research Center at Lauinger Library:
Maps of Sections and Lots in Holy Rood Cemetery
A copy of the 1933 map of sections and lots in Holy Rood Cemetery, obtainable at Special Collections, Lauinger Library, is indispensable to locating a grave.
A simplified arrangement of sections is given below.
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Carlton Fletcher
The citation and acknowledgement of my research is greatly appreciated.
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The support of the Advisory Neighborhood Council (3B) is gratefully acknowledged.