When a cemetary runs out of space and can no longer sell graves, how does it stay in business? I know that some people pay for perpetual care of the graves, but I wouldn’t think that would be enough to support the cemetary.
Zev Steinhardt
Expand, establish a branch at another location. I think most states have laws requiring a deposit into a trust fund for the care of cemetarys after the owner finds out it isn’t profitable to maintain them.
Waitaminnit! Your cemeteries are profit-making enterprises?!!
Weird.
AFAIK, our cemeteries are non-profit orgs that have been granted land, similar to churches… if they aren’t part of churches.
Yes, here in the good ole US of A, cemeteries can be money making enterprises. Not all, some are owned by churches or the state, but most are for profit enterprises.
This is how it works. When you die, if you did not already purhcase it, (there is a big business in prepaying the bural costs here) your executor purchases a plot. The purchase process is the same as any other purchase of real estate, you get a deed to the property and it is regiesterd in the local tax office as belonging to the person who is buried there. (So you really can take if with you, since after your death you still own the land you are buried under).
Here in Maryland, there is a law that requres for profit cemeteries to state how much of the purchase price is invested to provide for grave site care. The usual is ten percent of the purchase price. That money is placed in a trust and the interest is used to provide care in perpetuity. In Baltimore City, Maryland’s largest city with a population of about 750,000, there are several cemeteries that are full and are maintained in just this way.
Kind of related question, but why is it considered taboo in western civilisation to reuse burial space?
I know in India its not uncommon for grave yards to be leveled after 40-50 years of ‘occupation’ and the lot assigned to a new occupant. I mean its not like you need the space after 40 years of decay.
I don’t know why it’s taboo, but I certainly think old cemteries are a lot more interesting and beautiful than new ones.
I don’t know about the historical reasons, but I would guess that today’s pretty airtight caskets leads to possible saponification (well, I saw it on CSI anyway) and not real decomposition. If we did burials with either no casket or an easily decomposible casket, I think it’d be easier since you’d be looking at less of an exhumation.
Another reason is that private ownership of property is a cherished value in the U.S., and someone - the deceased, his family, etc. - would be thought of to have rights to that plot of land such that you couldn’t take it away from them and use it to burry another person. I have heard of cemetaries or portions of cemetaries being moved to make way for a highway or building, but I don’t know how this is accomplished.
Also, I tend to doubt that burial plots have deeds like other land in most stated. Certainly they could, but if this were not required most cemetary operators would choose not to grant a deed to the land becuse this would prevent the grave from being moved, etc. In most cases, you probably get something that looks like a deed but is a long term lease or something similar.
The legal system does not address many issues dealing with the deceased very well. In law school, I read a case where a funeral home employee abused a corpse. Although that is clearly wrong, it raises all sorts of challenging legal issues. Who “owns” the corpse and therefore has standing to sue? Can one sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress? In most states, there is a requirement of physical injury in order to bring such a suit, and can this requirement ever be satisfied with a corpse?
Way back when I worked for the City of Rochester. The City owned and operated two municipal working cemeteries. Every burial - even cremations in urns in crypts - was charged a “perpetual care” fee. The fee is supposed to be enough to cover ongoing maintenance. In reality, maintenance costs always go up much faster than the fees do. The city responded with various clever ways of using space so that more people could be buried there - you can put up a “high-rise” of urns that is much more densely “populated” than standard plots - but when the burials stop, it will create a crisis for maintenance.
But the city had also “inherited” every old (19th century) abandoned small local cemetery that was within city limits. I’m not sure how legally the city came into possession of them; it may have just “happened.” One of my projects was researching the legal status and history of all the small pocket parks in downtown. I found that several of them predated the incorporation of the city in 1834 and had never been formally dedicated as park space. They were just continued and maintained by the city and nobody ever thought to make it a legal formality when the New York State park laws were passed later on.
State cemetery law also came after 1834. It is immensely complex and probably has all sorts of rules for handling abandonment these days. But the principle of abandonment is very old and my guess is that back in the day when the growing city overtook what used to be outlying cemeteries and they either became used up or stopped functioning because neighbors didn’t want a working cemetery on their street, the city used abandonment just as it did buildings on which people stopped paying taxes.
I assume that most local governments in the U.S. wind up doing something along these lines for abandoned cemeteries. I don’t know how cemeteries associated with churches are generally handled, though, when the church closes down and a higher church body no longer pays for maintenance.
Not really in all of Western civilization. For example, in Germany the cemetaries (operated by municipialities or church congregations) reuse most burial plots after 20 to 30 years (for burials of couples/families: 20 to 30 years after the last burial). Burial plots are rented not bought.
The Christian churches are OK with that; for Muslim or Jewish burials permanent graves seem to be required.
I disagree - 4 months ago I visited the grave of my great-grandfather in a city 300 miles away - and he died in 1960. So that’s 43 years of decay. But I’m sure my situation is pretty rare since I’m into genealogy.
I was under the impression that after 100 years you can dig it all up? Or does that just apply to cemetaries with no easily determinable ownership (I vaugely remember the discovery of a slave cemetary somewhere upon digging a foundation, and after 100 years you can move the remains?) Can somebody clarify under what circumstances you can do this? Does there have to be some sort of “good faith” search for living relatives?
I think it varies by state, but normally there does need to be a search for relatives when they find a lost graveyard. Sometimes they have to publish notices in the newspaper with details about the graves to find relatives. After a certain amount of time if they don’t find the relatives they go ahead and move the graves - I assume to a nearby cememtary.
When they built the local sports arena a few years back they found some graves that were abandoned. Some fans suggested we should knickname the place “the tomb” but it didn’t catch on.
I think that guy who writes the books like “Do Penguins Have Knees” something…Feldman answered this question.
I believe he said cemetaries make money by selling extras on graves like markers, winter cover, flowers, wreaths. They also rent out land for gardens and to grow sod. I will see if I can find the book and see what else he says…
Right. When my mother visited her ancestral village in Germany, she found that the remains from all her ancestors from the 1800s had been removed.
And Native Americans go apeshit over the treatment of remains thousands of years old. :rolleyes:
Um, what do they do with the remains that they dig up? Certainly there must still be some bones and whatnot that haven’t degraded yet.
I know this to be true. I found out about when I went to see the graves of some relatives. It disturbed me at first but then I thought that makes sense. There’s not all together a lot of room here. Then I got really creeped out as I walked past the pile of leaf cuttings and what not…hmmm what do they do with those bones?
BUT now that you know all of that–something new. I was told that the family has the option to continue renting the grave of a loved one. That’s a money making opportunity if I ever saw one—Contact all people with a German last name and say pay us or we dig up someone who could possibly be related to you.
In Mexico, you can be buried in a municipal cemetary, but you have to move the body in five years.
To where? Another cemetary? If so, what’s the point?
Just when you’re getting comfortable, along comes a shovel…
One way to add revenue is to sell flowers and wreaths, and the like, to survivors who still come to decorate graves on certain holidays. Of course, after enough time there won’t be anyone to come and do that any more, but one thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the oldest cemeteries still have available plots. At least, that’s true of L.A., where we have a couple of cemeteries that go back to the mid 19th century; yet they still have vacant land available. Still, I don’t doubt that they have some graves that have not been visited or decorated in 75 or 100 years.