We want to find a graveyard that we think was used in the mid 1700s in rural southern New Hampshire. We expect it to be somewhere in a region of a couple hundred acres.
Exploring around for years and applying some knowledge of how graveyards are often situated, and knowing the farm houses and barns and the extents of the fields and locations of the roads, and searching in all seasons and during the slightest snow dustings especially, have only turned up one possible area where the arrangement of the everpresent stones looks a little headstone-like.
How do you detect an old grave? Can metal detectors do anything? Or depthfinders for boats? Or trained dogs? A brief stint with a ground-penetrating radar concentrated on just a couple areas that weren’t good candidates anyway. How expensive is buying or renting a ground-penetrating radar?
A friend of mine had a summer job locating the graves in an abandoned graveyard - that was easier than your case, since they knew the location of the graveyard, but the headstones were long gone.
They gave her a long, narrow metal rod that she stuck deep into the ground. She said as soon as it hit a grave, there was a completely different feel to the tension on the rod.
Did the graveyard have a church or chapel attached to it?
You may be able to spot parchmarks from the air - possibly even of the graves themselves.
Best to search during the summer when the ground is parched (hence the name!), and during early morning or late afternoon when the angle of the sun emphasises the topography.
Hot-air balloons or a microlight is good as it allows you to keep low enough to see evidence.
If you can get yourself to a reasonable height, say in a helicopter, and take photographs of the area you most suspect at either sun up (easiest) of sun down(somewhat harder due to limited light) then you may well find that shadows cast by the sun on a low horizon will show depressions or changes in the ground.
This tends to be easier in winter, as the sun takes a long time to cross the horizon, if you get snow, this can often show such ground anomalies even better.
This technique is widely used by prospecting archeologists, it can show up filed boundaries, long disused roads, dried up streams, settlements from individual sites through to entire towns.
I think this question probably ranks as the most obscure, specific question that I am qualified to answer. My in-laws have a circa 1700’s farm (300 acres) in Canterbury, NH. The restored the entire property and we always knew there was a colonial cemetery on the property. I searched for 3 years every time I visited and, like you, I found the shear amount of land daunting. I came up with nothing. One day, I was doing some different archaeology and I was exploring an old dump area about 75 yards from the barn (which is attached to the house via another building). I had searched through it before and found things from the late 1800’s through 1920’s. After that, it appears they built a chicken house over the entire thing.
I was pulling a large piece of metal out of the ground when I saw the corner of a man made stone. I got a shovel and cleared dirt off of the large block and it had a very large groove cut into the top. Success. That is a base stone that the tombstone rested in even though the tombstone itself was long gone (they tended to be thin and fragile back in those days). Using deduction about how graves would be spaced, I found four more that day. The graveyard itself is rather small at about 50 by 50 feet and it is surrounded by stone walls.
Because the situation is so similar, I would use characteristics to start, Mainly, do not assume that it will be far away from the house or that it will be large. The stone walls may be key.
My FIL is restoring the one on our farm and plans to be buried there. My wife and I have to inherit the farm because we are the only ones in the family capable of maintaining such a thing. we have to maintain it into perpetuity. If I didn’t find the graveyard, things might have been different. I am not sure if I am happy about it but these things can have big implications. Keep that in mind whenever you discover colonial graveyards.
I helped with the archeological dig on Johnson’s Island, near Sandusky, Ohio, a few years ago. It was the site of a camp for Confederate officer POWs during the Civil War. There’s a beautiful old cemetery nearby, for those who died in custody (far fewer than at many CW-era prisons, incidentally). By using ground-penetrating radar, they’ve discovered a half-dozen graves outside the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence. Don’t know how expensive GPR would be to rent, but it does work.
. I love this place! )