Methodology

The permanent residents: a map of New York City's cemeteries. Built June 2026.

What this map shows

594 cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds across the five boroughs — including ones that no longer physically exist. Each is labeled with a status: Active (126), Preserved (119, historic but no longer taking burials) or No longer extant (349, paved over, built upon or otherwise gone — the term Elizabeth Meade uses for these in her catalogue is "obliterated"). Founding years are shown for 494 of them, documented burial counts for 40 (each linked to its source with a confidence label) and lists of notable people buried there for 44 (about 2,800 people from Wikidata). By default the map shows active and preserved cemeteries; toggle "No longer extant" to reveal the vanished ones.

Data sources

• The cemetery inventory, founding years and status: the Cemeteries of New York City catalogue compiled by Elizabeth D. Meade, PhD, an archaeologist whose doctoral research identified and mapped the city's burial grounds (including long-obliterated ones) from historical records. Used here are her name, type, religion, status, founding/closing/obliteration years, notes and per-cemetery source citations. 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 active cemeteries: OpenStreetMap, queried via the Overpass API (June 10, 2026) for features tagged landuse=cemetery or amenity=grave_yard, clipped to the New York City borough boundaries published by the Department of City Planning and deduplicated by name and proximity. These supply the drawn polygons; 62 of these OpenStreetMap cemeteries were matched by name and location to Meade's catalogue to add status and founding years.
• Satellite imagery (optional toggle): Esri World Imagery (Maxar/Earthstar Geographics), shown clipped to the cemetery boundaries only — the surrounding city stays as the base map. Imagery appears only for cemeteries that have a drawn boundary, so the no-longer-extant sites mapped as single points show nothing under the satellite view.
• Official websites: the cemetery's own or operating organization's website, where one exists, linked from the detail panel (39 cemeteries). Sourced from Wikidata's official-website property (P856) and OpenStreetMap website tags; third-party pages (research blogs, National Register listings) were excluded so the link points to the cemetery itself.
• Notable burials: Wikidata, using the "place of burial" property (P119). Each person listed has a Wikidata entry recording burial at that cemetery; lists are sorted by how many Wikipedia language editions cover the person, as 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's own website or operating association, the text of its Wikipedia article, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designation reports, and reputable secondary sources such as the New York City Cemetery Project (nycemetery.wordpress.com), a research project by historian Mary French, and the Hart Island Project. Every count on the map carries a link to its specific source and a confidence label.

Why most cemeteries have no count

There is no central, authoritative dataset of how many people are buried in New York City's cemeteries — we confirmed this directly. The New York State Division of Cemeteries collects a "Number of Body Burials" field on its annual financial-report forms, but that data is released only through Freedom of Information Law requests, not published. Neither the Archdiocese of New York nor the Diocese of Brooklyn publishes total interments for its Catholic cemeteries. The open-data portals (NY State's Public Cemetery Locations, NYC Open Data, the federal USGS gazetteer) carry locations only, no counts. 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 here. That absence is why each count had to be sourced individually, and why 40 is the most we could responsibly document.

How burial counts were handled

• Each figure was verified against a fetched source page; counts were never estimated or extrapolated. Where a source gave a range or "more than X," the displayed text preserves that wording and the low end is used for sizing the map circles. Every count is shown as an approximation ("about," "over," "more than" and the like) — none should be read as an exact, audited tally.
• Counts mix two measures, labeled on each cemetery: interments (people buried) and graves (plots, which can hold more than one person). Interment totals are used when both exist.
• Confidence labels: "high" means the figure comes from the cemetery itself or a well-sourced Wikipedia article; "medium" means a single secondary source; figures we could not verify at all are shown as "no documented count" rather than guessed.
• The large majority of the 594 sites display no count, because no published figure was found — especially the no-longer-extant grounds, where no register survives. Absence of a number is not a claim that few people are buried there.
• Calvary Cemetery's roughly 3 million figure covers all four of its sections (First through Fourth Calvary); the sections are drawn as their two large parcels on the map. Hart Island, the city's public cemetery, has more than 1 million burials per its Wikipedia article and city reporting.

What "notable" means here

• A person appears only if Wikidata explicitly records the cemetery as their place of burial. This undercounts reality everywhere: Green-Wood says it has 580,000 permanent residents; Wikidata records under 900 of them.
• Coverage is uneven across cemeteries and eras, and reflects the biases of who gets a Wikipedia article. Cemeteries showing "no notable burials recorded" may simply be under-documented.
• For cemeteries with more than 150 recorded notables, the map ships the 150 most widely covered.

Known limitations

• The map is only as complete as its two inventories. Meade's catalogue is the most thorough public accounting of NYC burial grounds, but no such list is ever final — small family plots and undocumented grounds are certainly missing.
• For obliterated and some preserved sites, the point marks an approximate location, not a precise boundary; Meade flags cemeteries whose exact location could not be determined, and those are placed at a general vicinity.
• Status and founding years for the 49 active OpenStreetMap cemeteries that did not match a catalogue record are inferred (status shown as "Active"); a name-matching step links the rest, and imperfect matches are possible.
• Burial counts were published in different years and age at different rates; active cemeteries keep growing.
• Wikidata occasionally contains errors (misattributed burial places, reinterments recorded once). Claims were taken as recorded, not independently re-verified person by person.
• Cemetery religion labels come from OpenStreetMap tags and are incomplete.

Reproducibility

The processing pipeline (Overpass query, borough clipping, the Cemeteries of New York City catalogue extraction and merge, Wikidata SPARQL queries, Wikipedia infobox parsing and source-verified count research) is preserved in the project repository alongside the raw intermediate files. Map data files: data/cemeteries.geojson and data/notables.json; the catalogue extract is data/meade_cemeteries.json.