A documentation of the public sources from which the Gravesite Guide catalog has been compiled.

Wikidata

The principal source for the Gravesite Guide catalog is the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org. Wikidata is a free, collaboratively edited knowledge base that serves as the structured-data backbone of Wikipedia and a number of other Wikimedia projects. Gravesite Guide queries Wikidata for entities classified as cemeteries (instances or subclasses of Q39614) located in the United States (P17 wd:Q30) whose names contain keywords associated with African American history. Each result includes the cemetery's name, location data (city, state, geographic coordinates), founding date where recorded, image where available, National Register of Historic Places reference number where applicable, and any associated Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia "List of African American Cemeteries"

The catalog is supplemented by entries derived from the Wikipedia article "List of African American cemeteries," which serves as the single most comprehensive open-access listing of historic Black burial grounds in the United States. The article is organized by state and provides, for each entry, the cemetery's name, locality, county where applicable, and notable historical attributes. The Gravesite Guide catalog has parsed this article and merged its entries with the Wikidata results to produce a more complete picture than either source alone could supply.

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places, administered by the National Park Service, is the federal list of properties deemed worthy of preservation. The bulk-data export of the Register is available from the National Park Service at nps.gov. African American cemeteries listed on the Register appear in the Gravesite Guide catalog with their NRHP reference numbers and are flagged as listed properties throughout the site. The presence of a National Register listing is one of the most important indicators of a cemetery's recognized historical significance.

National Register Data Refresh (August 2026)

On 2026-08-29, the catalog's National Register fields were refreshed against the National Park Service's own bulk spreadsheet export of all National-Register-listed properties nationwide, national-register-listed_20260522.xlsx, downloaded directly from nps.gov (public domain, U.S. federal government work; dataset covers listings through 2026-05-22; 100,866 property rows).

Each of this archive's 579 cemetery records was compared to that spreadsheet by normalized exact match on property name and state, then confirmed by an exact match on county or city where this archive records one. No fuzzy or approximate matching was used, on the principle that a wrong match is worse than no match: a mismatched NRHP reference number would misattribute one cemetery's federal listing to a different one. Fourteen records were confirmed this way — twelve already carried an NRHP reference number from this catalog's Wikidata sourcing, so the refresh added only the National Register listing date for those; two records (Gower Cemetery, Oklahoma, and Mount Jackson Colored Cemetery, Shenandoah County, Virginia) gained a National Register reference number and listing date for the first time. A further two records matched a single nationwide property by name and state but conflicted with that property's recorded county (both called "Black Oak Cemetery," Arkansas, but the only NRHP-listed property of that name in Arkansas is in a third county) and were deliberately left unmatched rather than guessed. Forty-seven further records matched exactly one nationwide property by name and state but this catalog does not record a county or city for them to confirm against; these were also left without a listing date rather than assert a match this archive cannot independently confirm. The remaining 516 records had no exact name-and-state match in the National Register data at all — expected, since the great majority of the cemeteries in this catalog are not on the National Register. Every non-match keeps its existing (usually null) NRHP fields; nothing was guessed or gap-filled.

On founding dates: the National Register's "listed date" records when a property was added to the Register — a federal administrative act — and is not evidence of when a cemetery was founded. This refresh renders that date only under its own "Listed on National Register" label on each affected cemetery page and the corresponding nrhp_listed_date field in the catalog data; it was never written to, and never used to fill, this catalog's separate established (founding-date) field, which remains sourced only from Wikidata where actually recorded and is otherwise left null.

National Trust for Historic Preservation

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation publishes case studies and supporting materials documenting the historic Black sites it has supported through grant funding, including a substantial number of cemeteries. These materials, while not aggregated in a single bulk-data format, serve as an important reference for understanding which sites have been the subject of recent preservation effort and what the principal preservation challenges have been.

Editorial Process

The Gravesite Guide catalog is built through a structured ingestion process in which the source data are queried, parsed, deduplicated, and merged into a single canonical record per cemetery. Each record is associated with the source from which the principal information was drawn. Subsequent editorial work develops the descriptive content for each entry on the basis of the available structured data and the broader scholarly and preservation literature on African American burial grounds. The Gravesite Guide project does not claim original authority over the underlying historical record; the work is one of aggregation, presentation, and onward referral to the primary sources.

Limitations and Corrections

Any aggregation of data from multiple public sources will inevitably contain errors, gaps, and inconsistencies. The Gravesite Guide catalog is a starting point for further research, not a substitute for direct engagement with the sources or with the descendant communities most directly knowledgeable about each site. Corrections, additions, and supplementary information are welcome and should be directed through the channels described on the About page. The catalog will be updated periodically as the underlying source data is improved and as new sources are integrated.