Greenwood Cemetery
Award-Winning Area History Project
Greenwood Cemetery has been working to obtain, record and share historical information free to anyone and has been recognized in this effort by the Historical Society of Michigan and the Petoskey Chamber of Commerce.
Search our database for area obituaries. If the person is interred at Greenwood, results will show burial location information.
We are collecting, scanning and uploading area newspapers dating back to the 1800s so you can search them.
Click here to download a list of all of the papers in our archive (updated as of 9/15/2023)
Local historians have written several articles about area history and have entrusted their essays to this project.
The Petoskey News-Review donated its archive of photos (some from 1930s-2011) to the project.
Research Best Practices
If you are going to visit a cemetery to obtain genealogical information here are a few suggestions.
​
-
Be prepared. Have your paperwork and questions ready.
-
Call ahead. Before going to the cemetery give the employees time to gather your information or ask them to mail it to you.
-
Offer to pay for the materials you are given. At Greenwood we do not charge for normal requests but some cemeteries expect some type of remuneration. We have had some researchers ask for thousands of pages of information to be mailed to them. We must charge for this type of request.
-
It may be nice to call for an appointment at some cemeteries. Many do not have a secretary or a full-time staff person dedicated to handling this type of request. At Greenwood we have regular hours but we do not have enough staff to have someone in the office every hour of the day. If you call ahead we can make an appointment to be sure to meet you at a convenient time for both of us.
Corrections
The crew of Greenwood Cemetery has spent thousands of hours in an effort to compile the best records possible. Our handwritten records go back to the early 1900's. We have sought to compile better records by examining every lot in the Cemetery, by going through old funeral home records, by reading obituaries from old newspapers and by input from family members.
​
There are many conflicts in the various sources of information. We choose which information we believe to be most accurate based on the weight of evidence. Obviously, there are times when we choose wrongly when dealing with records that are more than 100 years old. We wish to make our records as correct as possible but you will need to give us some type of proof that your 'correction' is more correct than our record.
​
The records include burials in Greenwood Cemetery and also burials in other cemeteries as we have gathered information from obituaries and from funeral homes.
About Greenwood Cemetery's
Area History Project
​
In 1982, we began placing our lot owner and burial records on Emmet County’s new mainframe computer. I spent many hours in a basement office of the county building entering and editing records. The ability to sort records by many different criteria was astounding! And distressing! It pointed out errors in our records which had been made decades previously and were unnoticed until the computer brought them to our attention.
That project pointed out to me the necessity of doing a major overhaul of our records. Over a period of years, we made three inventories of the burials in the cemetery by visiting each lot and every grave. We recorded the information that was on every monument and marker. On the last inventory, we took a photo of every marker in the cemetery. Stone Funeral Home of Petoskey allowed us to put their burial records into our database, this included the records of the Henika Funeral Home. Schiller Funeral Home of Harbor Springs allowed us to input the records of the Erwin Funeral Home into our database as well.
In 1985, we began to cut obituaries of persons to be interred at Greenwood Cemetery from the Petoskey News-Review. Then we began to cut all of the obituaries, whether they were interred at Greenwood or not. That was a great project going forward, but it didn’t help us with our old records. The Petoskey Public Library graciously allowed us to digitally scan the local newspapers that were in their possession on microfilm. Much of the film was very good quality, but some of it was horrendous.
Then the Little Traverse Bay History Museum gave us their copies of the actual bound copies of newspapers going back to the 1880s. Now we could scan the actual newspaper. The quality was better, but scanning one side of one page at a time was tedious work.
Because we had possession of the actual newspaper, we received many requests to examine them in our office. We do not have enough staff for this so we decided to place all of the scanned newspapers on our website. Our programmer did his thing and we were able to make this resource available to the general public.
We began another project of downloading all of the death certificates from the seekingmichigan.org website. We entered the information from them and then uploaded them to our website.
In 2017, we received a grant from The Henry E. and Counselo S. Wenger Foundation to scan all of the Pellston and Levering newspapers. These newspapers would have been the very last for us to do but with this grant we were able to scan them and place them on the web. There is much valuable information regarding the upper end of the County but also of Petoskey and Harbor Springs in these newspapers.
When we first began scanning microfilm, the project was tedious enough that we only scanned the front page, the obit page and any other page of particular interest. That worked for our needs, but when we placed the papers on the web it was not enough for researchers.
In 2018, the Petoskey Public Library received a large grant from The Friends of the Petoskey Public Library to re-scan those incomplete newspapers and to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) all of the newspapers so they would be searchable. That work was close to completion in February of 2019).
We received another grant in 2018 from The Henry E. and Counselo S. Wenger Foundation to develop or purchase software to search the newspapers for keywords
We have been able to bring you this wonderful resource because of thousands of hours by our staff. But our efforts were not enough, each one of the groups mentioned above have contributed to this endeavor. It began with an effort to make our records better, we are not done with that project yet. We are still working. Stay tuned.
Photos and History Research
Another part of our website are the thousands of photos and historical documents. This also has been an effort of the many. Greenwood staff has taken a photo of every monument and marker in the cemetery. This is an ongoing project as new memorials are added and existing memorials are updated with names and death dates.
The photo database and historical documents is a joint effort of many: The Howard and Lila Ball Collection; The Dick Smith Collection; The Petoskey Public Library; and The Little Traverse History Museum. The overwhelming majority of photos are from the archives of the Petoskey News-Review. We scan them, format them, name them and place them on the web for your enjoyment. These are made searchable through the efforts of our website programmer, an extremely capable individual who spends many hours making all of the above resources accessible.
-- Karl Crawford, superintendent