Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans

In every burying ground and cemetery, there are hidden people, ones for whom there are no  markers or whose wooden (or other) markers have long-ago disappeared.  These graves are those of the poor, the lonely, and disdained.  There are even entire burying grounds without any remaining markers.  Some of these unmarked graves and cemeteries mark the final resting place of enslaved African Americans. Not all of them are unmarked and not all of them are unknown.

The Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans is seeking to document those cemeteries which have the remains of those who lived in slavery in the United States.

The mission of the Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans is to identify, document and memorialize burial sites of the enslaved, most of which are abandoned or undocumented.  Operating from the premise that all burial sites are sacred, we seek to identify these grounds by creating a database for their documentation regardless of their current condition - survived and protected or neglected and deserted.

The form for submitting a site is easy to fill out.  I submitted Gethsemane Cemetery in Little Ferry, because of the one known burial of a previously enslaved woman,

Elizabeth Dickerson Campbell Sutliff Dulfer (ca. 1790-1880).  She was manumitted in 1822 and after 1840 began buying clay-rich property and selling the clay to the brick and pottery industries.  There is an excellent guide to the cemetery--Gethsemane Cemetery: Guide to the Gravemarkers and their Inscriptions.  The names of the people buried there are from markers and from funeral home records.  Out of over 500 burials, only 27 markers with inscriptions survived.

I learned about Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans from  "Burial Sites Of Slaves, Marked On the Web," by Sarah Maslin Nir. New York Times, March 19, 2013.