Wake Wednesday - Filter by Category in the Wake Cemetery Survey - Find African American Cemeteries and More

I just wanted to take a moment to point out the category feature on the Wake Cemetery Survey Project that you see above. It is there to help you search more quickly. Use these category groups to narrow your search:

• General Information
• African-American Cemetery
• Church Cemetery
• Community Cemetery
• Family and Slave Cemetery
• Family Cemetery
• Indian Cemetery
• Slave Cemetery
• Unknown Cemetery

These categories refer to the smaller cemeteries. You will not find a category for the likes of Oakwood, or Raleigh City Cemetery. These are limited to searching one type of category at at time and we were only able to assign one category to each cemetery. Note that the category names were assigned with the word usage used in the original survey. *

The category feature is helpful feature to highlight right now as many observe Black History Month and honor their ancestors by researching their family history. 

The Category search works by township. If you don't know the part of Wake County you want to look in, you can use the descriptions of the main page or the township map to help you pick the correct township tab to open. 

Let's look at how this works with St Matthews township. Note that at some point in time, the files for St. Matthews township suffered some extreme water exposure and damage. Lynne Deese took great pains to remediate both the mold and the damage done. While discoloration still exists, the majority of the files for St Matthews are very readable thanks to Lynne's efforts.

On opening the St Matthews Township tab and choosing the African-American Cemetery Category, the search returns eleven cemeteries that were surveyed for the project. 

See the full list here

Selecting the Slave Cemetery category, returns two cemeteries in St Matthews township.

link

Finally, searching the Family and Slave category for St Matthews does not return any cemeteries. There are a few townships that have cemeteries that fit this category, but the only way to know for sure is to check.

Here are a pair of Family and Slave cemeteries referenced in Buckhorn township. 

link

Please visit the Wake Cemetery Survey at our website and explore using the categories feature in your own research.

Note that historical materials often include viewpoints, language, norms, and values of the original creators that may be harmful to our sensibilities today. The words used here are the categories used at the time of the original survey.*

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