An excerpt from Bertie Dawes' notebook, "Little Old Cemetery on our place," which detailed the location of known burials in 1940 (likely evidenced by surviving upright headstones).

The Beard-Green Cemetery is a private family graveyard, with its earliest burial traditionally dated to 1801. Surveys of surviving tombstones suggest that approximately 200 people are buried within its grounds. Identifying all of them, however, remains a significant challenge.

In the early 19th century, Ohio had no statewide requirement to record deaths. Small frontier cemeteries like Beard-Green had no sexton or caretaker to document burials, and no formal burial records from the period survive. As a result, there is no contemporary documentation verifying who is buried within the cemetery or where individual graves are located. Our knowledge depends almost entirely on the headstones that remain more than 220 years after the first burial—many of which are now missing, unmarked, or so weathered that their inscriptions are no longer legible.

The earliest systematic efforts to document burials at Beard-Green occurred in the 20th century, when individuals walked the grounds and recorded what could still be read on surviving markers.

In 1940, Bertie Dawes documented her efforts to care for the cemetery in a notebook titled Little Old Cemetery on Our Place. Her meticulous records mapped the location of each intact headstone and, when possible, transcribed the deceased’s name and date of death. Dawes identified 104 marked graves. She also noted an additional 79 burials represented by unmarked or illegible stones whose identities were already lost to time. These unidentified graves were not mapped.

Thirty years later, in 1970, members of the Johnstown Genealogy Society of nearby Monroe Township conducted a second survey of what was then known as the Beard Cemetery. Describing their work as an “all-out effort to obtain the complete data on every tombstone,” they recorded inscriptions from surviving markers and noted that broken stones had been reassembled, buried stones excavated, and displaced stones recovered from fence lines. Their census documented 120 burials—sixteen more than Dawes had recorded, including five interments that occurred after her 1940 survey.

The Johnstown survey identified eleven graves that Dawes had not recorded. One belonged to Mary, wife of Anthony Geiger (1774–1832). It is possible that Mary (Kirk) Geiger’s headstone had been buried and was successfully uncovered during the Genealogy Society’s work. Unfortunately, more than fifty years later, her marker is now missing, and no physical evidence of her burial remains. Her case illustrates the ongoing risks to the cemetery’s historical record and the urgency of preservation efforts.

Consult the Headstone Censuses

• Little Old Cemetery on our place (Bertie Dawes, 1940)

• Beard Cemetery Inscriptions (Johnstown Genealogy Society, 1970)

• Find A Grave (contemporary crowd-sourced data)