DIGGING FOR ROOTS
Green-Wood offers service to help build family trees
GREEN-WOOD cemetery has a new lease on life.
Researchers for the sprawling 478-acre burial grounds are pioneering a new genealogy-for-hire project, pulling family tree information from the cemetery’s in-house records for paying customers.
“We have this unique collection of documents, and we really should be sharing them with the public,” Green-Wood Cemetery historian Jeff Richman told the Daily News.
An estimated 20 million people can trace their history to the 560,000 dead who are buried in the cemetery, including famous men Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Charles Ebbets and Horace Greeley, Green-Wood officials said.
The result is a massive paper trail that includes business records, annual logs, letters from family members and more.
Green-Wood quietly debuted the new research program i n 2013, offering document sleuthing ser vices for $28 per 30 minutes. The service has been so popular — requests average 25 a week — that the cemetery has hired five graduate students as researchers and began publicizing it last week.
“It’s great stuff,” said Judy Russell, an attorney and genealogist who runs The Legal Genealogist blog. “I wish my parents were buried there.”
The popularity of genealogy has increased in recent years with sites such as Ancestry. com, catering to amateur bloodline sleuths tracing their roots, but few major cem- eteries offer more than cursory information.
The reason is the time and cost in- volved to do the research, Russell said.
“In order to continue the work they do, and also make t he records available, somebody has to pay a price,” she said.
Green-Wood’s fee allows the privately funded cemetery to offer the service by covering research costs, but it only breaks even, Richman said.
Customers contact researchers through Green-Wood’s website, often with only the name of a long-dead relative they suspect is buried in the cemetery.
“What we’re really trying to do here is help families tell their stories,” researcher Mark Daly said.
But be prepared. Old family legends of famous ancestors can fall apart when faced with the facts, researchers warn. “Often,” Daly said, “what we find is more mysteries.” dmmurphy@nydailynews.com