Methodology

The permanent residents: a map of New York City's cemeteries. Built June 2026; corrected October 6, 2026, after a full fact-check, and November 6, 2026, after a follow-up review (see Corrections).

What this map shows

547 cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds across the five boroughs, including ones that no longer physically exist. Each is labeled with a status: Active (77, still taking burials), Preserved (118, historic and still there but no longer taking burials) or No longer extant (352, paved over, built upon or otherwise gone; Elizabeth Meade's term for these in her catalogue is "obliterated"). Founding years are shown for 489 of them, documented counts for 40 (each with its source named and linked, and a confidence label: 35 count people, four count graves and one counts gravestones and markers) and lists of notable people buried there for 45 (2,887 people recorded in Wikidata). By default the map shows active and preserved cemeteries; toggle "No longer extant" to reveal the vanished ones.

Some burial grounds appear as more than one point. Meade's catalogue keeps separate records for a surviving part of a cemetery and a part that was destroyed (for instance where a street was cut through), and for separate parcels, and the map follows her records.

Data sources

• The cemetery inventory, founding years and status: the Cemeteries of New York City catalogue by Elizabeth D. Meade, PhD, which she built for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, "Prepare for Death and Follow Me": An Archaeological Survey of the Historic Period Cemeteries of New York City (2020). Through documentary research she identified 527 burial sites in the city and mapped each one. Her catalogue has 552 records, because some sites are split into parts; the map includes 547 of them. Five that repeat a cemetery already shown were left off: destroyed edges of Washington, Cypress Hills and Mount Carmel cemeteries, and second parcels of Cypress Hills and uptown Trinity cemeteries. Used here are her name, type, religion, status, founding, closing and obliteration years, notes, record of where removed remains were reinterred, location-precision flag, per-site citations and the footprint she mapped for each site, all shown in each cemetery's detail panel. Her published map is an embedded Esri/ArcGIS web map; the underlying feature data was read from that map's public service. See her site for her full methodology and bibliography.
• Boundaries of cemeteries: OpenStreetMap, queried via the Overpass API (June 10, 2026) for features tagged landuse=cemetery or amenity=grave_yard and clipped to the borough boundaries published by the Department of City Planning. These supply the 107 drawn outlines (plus 2 OpenStreetMap points). Each was matched to its record in Meade's catalogue by name and location, and every match was checked by hand.
• Satellite imagery (optional toggle): Esri World Imagery (Maxar, Earthstar Geographics), shown only inside the cemetery outlines. Sites mapped as single points show nothing under the satellite view.
• Official websites: the cemetery's own or its operator's website, linked from the detail panel for 42 cemeteries. They come from Wikidata's official-website property (P856) and OpenStreetMap website tags, and every link was tested in October 2026.
• Notable burials: Wikidata's "place of burial" property (P119). Each person listed has a Wikidata entry recording burial at that cemetery. Lists are sorted by the number of Wikidata sitelinks (Wikipedia language editions plus other Wikimedia projects), a rough proxy for prominence. Birth and death years and one-line descriptions also come from Wikidata.
• Burial counts: assembled cemetery by cemetery from, in order of preference, the cemetery or its operator; government records (New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designation reports, NYC Parks, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs); Wikipedia sentences that cite a reliable source; and researched secondary sources, chiefly the New York City Cemetery Project by historian Mary French. Every count is listed with its source in the table below.

Burial counts and their sources

Each figure was checked against the source page or document linked here; none was estimated or extrapolated. Where a source gives a minimum ("more than," "over") the map says "more than"; where it gives an approximation the map keeps it ("about," "an estimated"). The stated number is used for sizing the map circles and, for counts of people, for the totals below. The map prepends "about" to bare numbers, since none of these is an audited tally.

Confidence labels. High: the cemetery or its operator, a government body, or a Wikipedia sentence that cites a reliable source. Medium: a single researched secondary source. Low: a figure whose own sourcing is weak, such as an uncited Wikipedia sentence, an advocacy group's estimate or a decades-old snapshot. "People" counts interments; "graves" counts graves or plots, which can hold more than one person; "gravestones and markers" counts stones recorded in a survey, which is not a count of people or of graves.

Source type is listed separately from confidence. Bayside Cemetery's figure is rated high under these rules, but it comes from a news report as cited on Wikipedia (Wikipedia, citing The New York Times (2008)), not from the cemetery or a government body; the original article was not checked directly.

Adding up the counts

Taking only the figures that count people, each at its stated number, and adding them:

Published figures for the 29 cemetery records with high- or medium-confidence sources add to about 6.9 million interments. This is an incomplete, mixed-date sum: some source figures are approximate, others are stated minimums, and it is not an audited citywide count. The sums above are arithmetic on published figures, not counts of unique people; remains moved from one cemetery to another may appear in more than one figure. The four grave counts (75,140 graves) are left out, because a grave can hold more than one person, and so is Brinckerhoff Cemetery's 77 gravestones and markers, from a 1919 survey, because a stone is not a person. The figures cover a small share of the city's 547 sites: no count was located for most of them, several figures are years old and Mokom Sholom's covers only one section. Calvary is counted at its operator's figure of 1.75 million rather than the widely repeated 3 million. Published figures can't settle whether the people buried in the city outnumber the people who live here.

How big are the sites without counts?

Meade's catalogue maps a footprint for each site whose location is known. Measured from those shapes, not from the OpenStreetMap outlines drawn on the map (the "sites with a count" include the three Calvary divisions covered by Calvary's figure). Areas are summed site by site, not merged, so any overlap between footprints is counted twice:

Most sites without a count are small: 152 are church or synagogue burial grounds and 142 are family burying grounds. Most of the uncounted mapped area is in 41 active cemetery records for which no count was located (searches as of October 2026), led by Saint John Cemetery (183 acres), Saint Raymond’s Cemetery (110 acres), Moravian Cemetery (93 acres), Ocean View Cemetery (86 acres) and United Hebrew Cemetery (63 acres). Together the sites without counts account for 28% of the summed mapped area. 89 of them are mapped only to a general vicinity and are not measured.

Area is only a rough guide to burials: density varies widely, and many vanished grounds were emptied. Meade records remains moved, in whole or part, from at least 29 of them to Cypress Hills, 24 to Green-Wood and 20 to Woodlawn (entries she marks "possibly" are not counted here). All three cemeteries have counts above, so some of those people are already in the totals.

Why most cemeteries have no count

We found no central public dataset of how many people are buried in New York City's cemeteries. The New York State Division of Cemeteries asks cemetery corporations to report their "Number of Body Burials" for each year on their annual financial reports, but these are yearly figures, not running totals, and we found no published dataset of them. We found no published totals from the Diocese of Brooklyn's cemetery office; the Archdiocese of New York's cemetery arm gives figures for Calvary and Resurrection and a combined figure for its five cemeteries. The open-data portals (New York State's Public Cemetery Locations, NYC Open Data, the U.S. Geological Survey gazetteer) carry locations only. Find A Grave's per-cemetery figures count volunteer-created memorials rather than actual interments, and its terms prohibit automated collection, so it is not used. Absence of a number on the map is not a claim that few people are buried there.

Where the map departs from or qualifies Meade's catalogue

Founding years and statuses follow Meade's catalogue except in these cases, where a primary or better-documented source disagrees or qualifies the record. Each is also explained in the cemetery's detail panel. Founding years otherwise keep Meade's qualifiers ("c. 1654," "1746 or 1751").

• Bayside Cemetery, founding year 1865: Founded by Congregation Shaare Tsedek. Meade's catalogue gives 1860. Source: JewishGen (Florence Marmor).
• Chatham Square Cemetery, founding year 1683: The land was bought in 1682 and the first burial was in 1683. Meade's catalogue gives 1656 or 1683. Source: Congregation Shearith Israel.
• Cypress Hills National Cemetery, status: Closed to new graves; eligible family members can still be buried in existing gravesites. Source: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
• First Shearith Israel Cemetery, founding year 1683: The land was bought in 1682 and the first burial was in 1683. Meade's catalogue gives 1656 or 1683. Source: Congregation Shearith Israel.
• Moravian Cemetery, founding year c. 1740: Gravestones begin in 1740. Meade lists 1763, when the congregation bought its church plot, and 1842, when the cemetery was incorporated. Source: Meade's catalogue notes.
• Mount Carmel Cemetery, founding year 1906: First burial December 28, 1906. Meade's catalogue gives 1902. Source: Mount Carmel Cemetery's website.
• New Utrecht Cemetery, status: Meade's catalogue lists it as closed in 1879, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission reported in 1998 that it was still in limited use, with the most recent burial in 1997. Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report (1998).
• New York City Marble Cemetery, status: Meade's catalogue lists it as preserved, but descendants' family vaults still take occasional interments; the cemetery's register records one in October 2025. Source: New York City Marble Cemetery's register.
• Old Gravesend Cemetery, founding year by 1658: The burial ground existed by 1658; the earliest recorded death in Gravesend was in 1650. Meade's catalogue gives c. 1643. Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report (1976).
• Saint Raymond’s Cemetery, founding year 1875: Meade lists the old cemetery (opened 1875, shown separately as Preserved) and the new cemetery (opened 1954, 110 acres) as separate records; this outline and the Wikidata notables here cover both. Source: Meade's catalogue (old cemetery record).

What "notable" means here

• A person appears only if Wikidata records the cemetery as their place of burial. This undercounts reality everywhere: Green-Wood says it has 580,000 permanent residents, and the map lists 862 of them.
• Coverage is uneven across cemeteries and eras and reflects who gets a Wikipedia article. Cemeteries showing "no notable burials recorded" may be under-documented.
• Trinity Church has three burial grounds in Manhattan, and Wikidata often records burials only at an umbrella "Trinity Church Cemetery" item. The map assigns those people to the churchyard at Broadway and Wall Street, St. Paul's Chapel or the uptown cemetery at 155th Street using Trinity's churchyard register, its uptown walking-tour guide and other documentation. People who could not be placed are left off. People Wikidata records at the uptown cemetery who died before it opened in 1842 are also left off, since no reinterment is documented for them.
• Wikidata burial claims were spot-checked for the most prominent people at the largest cemeteries; claims contradicted by a reliable source were removed (see Corrections). Others were taken as recorded and may contain errors.
• For cemeteries with more than 150 recorded notables, the map lists the 150 with the most sitelinks (1,508 people in all).

Known limitations

• The map is only as complete as its inventories. Meade's catalogue is the most thorough public accounting of the city's burial grounds, but small family plots and undocumented grounds are certainly missing.
• For destroyed and some preserved sites, the point marks an approximate location, not a boundary. Where Meade could not fix the exact site, the detail panel says the location is approximate.
• Burial counts were published in different years, and active cemeteries keep growing.
• Religion labels come from Meade's catalogue where it gives one, otherwise from OpenStreetMap tags, and are incomplete.

Reproducibility

The raw inputs and intermediate files are in the project repository: the Overpass query and its output, the Meade catalogue extract (data/meade_cemeteries.json) and the full web map it came from, with her mapped footprints (data/meade_webmap.json), Wikidata query results and Wikipedia infobox parses. The scripts that first processed them in June 2026 were not saved. The October and November 2026 corrections were made with scripts that are saved in scripts/2026-10-fact-check/ and scripts/2026-11-fact-check/. The map's data files are data/cemeteries.geojson and data/notables.json.

Corrections

November 6, 2026. A follow-up review found and fixed these problems:

• Brinckerhoff Cemetery's 77 had been counted as people. The Landmarks Preservation Commission report gives 77 gravestones and markers recorded in a 1919 survey, so it is now shown as a marker count and left out of the people total. The high-confidence sum fell by 77; the rounded totals did not change.
• The totals had been described as a floor for the city. They are an incomplete sum of published figures, some approximate and of different dates, and are now described that way.
• The map had said dozens of active cemeteries "publish no count." It now says no count was located for them in this inventory.
• The top confidence tier had been labeled as cemeteries' own or official figures, but Bayside's comes from a news report cited on Wikipedia. Each figure's source type is now listed separately from its confidence.
• The totals panel said its acreage came from OpenStreetMap outlines. It comes from Meade's mapped footprints.
• Two remaining duplicate entries were merged, bringing the total to 547 and active cemeteries to 77: the East Division point of uptown Trinity Cemetery (giving Trinity Cemetery the combined 17.71-acre footprint of both divisions) and Heart of Jesus Cemetery on Staten Island (matched to Meade's Polish National/Christian Rehoboth Cemetery record).
• Meade's closing and obliteration years, historical notes, catalogue names and religion labels had been omitted from 61 OpenStreetMap cemeteries matched in June 2026 and were restored.
• Unsourced Wikidata burial claims for actor Robert Blake (cremated in Los Angeles) at Saint Peter's Cemetery on Staten Island and artist Jeanne-Claude (body donated to science) at Hart Island were removed, and the 150th notable entry at Green-Wood Cemetery (John George Brown) was restored.
• Duplicate "graves" labels on Saint Peter's and Lawrence cemeteries were fixed, and Mount Judah and Hart Island were removed from the list of departures from Meade's catalogue (since Meade gives the same founding years).
• Mokom Sholom's source file now also links to an archived copy.

October 6, 2026. A full fact-check of the map found and fixed these errors:

• 47 entries duplicated a cemetery already on the map, usually once from OpenStreetMap and once from Meade's catalogue, often with conflicting statuses (Chatham Square's Shearith Israel cemetery, for one, was shown as both active and preserved). The duplicates were merged, the total fell from 594 to 549 and the active count from 126 to 79. Union Field and New Union Field cemeteries had been matched to each other's records.
• Three catalogue sites at the water's edge had been dropped by the borough clipping and were restored: the Wallabout Bay prison-ship burials, the Swinburne Island crematorium and the Lawrence family plot at College Point. A pet cemetery at the Church of St. Andrew on Staten Island was removed.
• Burial counts corrected to the cemeteries' own or official figures: Calvary (about 3 million to more than 1.75 million), Mount Carmel (85,000 plots to 135,000 people), Mount Hebron (220,000 to 217,000), Woodlawn (300,000 to 310,000), the Evergreens (526,000 to 538,000), Moore-Jackson (48 to at least 51 graves). Saint Raymond's figure of half a million was a capacity, not a count, and was removed. Flushing's 41,000 is now labeled as a 1951 figure. New Utrecht's count of about 1,300 was added. Several confidence labels were lowered where the source turned out to be uncited.
• Founding years corrected for Saint Raymond's (1954, the new section, to 1875), Bayside, Moravian, Old Gravesend, Lawrence (Astoria), Hart Island, First Shearith Israel, Mount Judah and Salem Fields; Calvary's (1848) was added. New York City Marble Cemetery, which still takes family interments, is now shown as active.
• Of 77 people listed at the uptown Trinity Church Cemetery, 38 are buried at Trinity's churchyard at Broadway and Wall Street and one at St. Paul's Chapel, and they were moved there; 27 who could not be placed with confidence, or who are buried elsewhere, were removed. The uptown cemetery's own notables (John James Audubon, Ralph Ellison, Ed Koch and others) were added. Margaret Sanger (buried in Fishkill, N.Y.), Albert Fish (Sing Sing) and William Livingston (moved to Green-Wood in 1844) were removed from cemeteries where they are not buried, and Laurie Bird, recorded at two cemeteries, from both. Four misspelled names were fixed, including Lucky Luciano and Phoebe Cary.
• Broken or redirected website links were fixed; the Flatbush African Burial Ground link had begun redirecting to an unrelated site and was removed.
• The methodology had misstated what is published about Catholic cemetery totals and the state's burial reports, Wikidata's coverage of Green-Wood and the availability of the pipeline scripts, and has been corrected.