Taking over as cemetery sexton — what to secure first

This is how we would approach it, from working alongside small cemeteries — not a rulebook. Your state, your bylaws, and your own board have the final say, and nothing here is legal advice.

Somebody kept your cemetery for twenty or thirty years. They knew which corner of Section C was spoken for, which family had paid and which had not, and where the row jogs around the old oak. Then they retired, or moved, or died, and what is left is a box.

You are not the first person to be handed that box. Work in this order.

1. Get everything into one place, today

Before anything is organised, it has to be gathered. Records for a small cemetery are usually in more places than anyone expects: the office, a home, a church basement, a safe deposit box, a filing cabinet at the township hall, and a computer nobody has the password to.

Ask plainly and ask everyone — the family, the previous board, the funeral homes that have served the cemetery, the county clerk, and the monument company. Funeral homes and monument dealers sometimes hold copies of the documents you are missing, and it costs nothing to ask.

This step is urgent in a way the others are not. Records scatter further with every month that passes, and the people who know where they went are the same people who are hardest to reach later.

2. Photograph it before you sort it

Take a picture of every page before anybody reorganises anything. A phone is fine. Do it in order, and do not stop to fix things you notice.

The reason is that sorting destroys information. The order the cards were in, the pencil in the margin, the sticky note clipped to page forty — all of it means something, and none of it survives a well-intentioned afternoon with a new binder. Photograph first, and the original arrangement is recoverable no matter what happens next.

Put the photographs in two places. One copy is not a backup.

3. Write down what you cannot answer

Make a list of the questions the records do not answer. Typically: which plots are sold but not used, who holds deeds that were never recorded, what is owed, and where the section boundaries actually run.

This list is the real inventory of the problem, and it is worth more than a tidy binder. It also tells you who still needs to be interviewed while they can still be asked.

4. Interview the people who remember

Somebody in the community knows things that were never written down. The predecessor's spouse. The grave digger. The board member who has been there longest. The woman who has been putting flowers out every Decoration Day since 1974.

Ask them about your list from step three, and write the answers down the same day. This is the step people skip and regret, because the window closes.

5. Get it typed up — and stop keeping it in one head

Then, and only then, put it into something. A spreadsheet is a perfectly respectable start and far better than nothing. What matters is that the knowledge stops living in one person and starts living in a record that the next volunteer can read without being trained by you.

That is the failure you are currently cleaning up. Do not rebuild it.

Where Sexton fits

Sexton is built for exactly this moment. It takes the spreadsheet you make in step five — drop the file in, match the columns, confirm the count — and turns it into a plot map, a deed register, an interment register, and the association's ledger. There is no fee for bringing old records in.

It keeps the whole thing in one file on your own computer, which is the part that matters for step five: a file can be handed to the next person. A login and a habit cannot. What Sexton does sets out the rest.

If you are at step one of this list and not sure where to start, write to hello@sextonapp.com or call 217-288-3351, and we will work out an order with you. That conversation is free, and there is nothing to sign up for.