Livermore-Amador Genealogical Society St. Michael Cemetery Burial Records, 1881-2000 Linda Trudeau, Project Leader, George Anderson, Editor Linda Trudeau, William Silver, Marelene Silver, Jeri Ramos, Frank Geasa, Jon Bryan, Harriet Anderson, George Anderson, Transcribers March 26, 2001

The Livermore-Amador Genealogical Society (L-AGS) thanks Jayne Archer, Superintendent of St. Michael Cemetery, for her friendly cooperation in making the records available to L-AGS and to the world of genealogists.

To search for a name immediately, go to Name Index to St. Michael Cemetery Burial Records. To fully understand the results found, return to this page and read the following discussion of the history, the scope and the limitations of the records.

St. Michael Cemetery is located at 3885 East Avenue in Livermore, California (map). It was purchased in 1881 as part of ten acres of land by St. Michael's Church of Livermore. Management was transferred to The Catholic Cemeteries, Diocese of Oakland on January 1, 1999. A more detailed history is given elsewhere on the this Web site.

L-AGS surveyed the gravestones in St. Michael Cemetery in the 1980s. The results were included in the book, "Four Cemeteries in Livermore, California," 1988. This book is still available for sale. The full text of the book is also available on the L-AGS Web site.

The St. Michael burial records, as distinct from the gravestone inscriptions, have never before been published to our knowledge. L-AGS is pleased to present them for the first time on these Web pages.

Burial records are useful primarily because they furnish data about interments without gravestones. There are burials in St. Michael Cemetery without gravestones, and, conversely, gravestones without corresponding entries in the burial records. The records are also useful because they document burials since 1983, when the gravestone inscriptions were surveyed by L-AGS.

The original burial records are in the possession of:

St. Michael Cemetery
3885 East Avenue
P.O. Box 2149
Livermore, CA 94550

Tel. 925 455 9696
Fax 925 455 1096

It is important to note that the transcription of the burial records presented here was not made from the original, handwritten documents. The originals are fragile, could not be removed from the cemetery office, and could not feasibly be photocopied.

Luckily, there had been a previous transcription of the original records. That work was carried out in 1972 by the church staff using a manual typewriter. The result was a ledger-bound book of 69 legal-sized pages in landscape format. In the 30 years since then, these pages have been marked up with handwritten notes about additional burials, disinterments and re-burials, purchase of pre-need plots, and corrections of errors. These 69 pages were easily photocopied and divided among the L-AGS transcribers for this publication.

Another important point to note is that the burial records presented here are for the older part of St. Michael Cemetery only. Burials continue to this day in the older part, and when records exist for these burials, we have included them here. Since 1973, many burials have been made in a newer area of the cemetery. We hope to include these records in a future update of this publication.

It is clear that over the 120 years of operation of St. Michael Cemetery, record-keeping was not always meticulous. There are gravesites that may or may not be occupied. There are others that are occupied, but by unknown persons. The present management of the cemetery has mounted a strong effort to fill in the gaps with data from other sources. The old data usually consists only of a name, date of burial and grave location. Records of new burials are being computerized immediately with more complete information about the decedent.

Although St. Michael Cemetery was not established until 1881, there are a few burial records and a few gravestones dated before that. We believe these represent reburials, that is, remains transported from other cemeteries after 1881.

Explanation of the Data Fields

Most of the entries in the marked-up 1972 transcription contain only the decedent's name, date of burial and grave location. There are also many informal notes of genealogical interest, for instance, "Vodie Fallon (Mrs. Dan Fallon)." We have taken pains to record all information exactly as given, with some explicit exceptions, as follows:

• We have deleted mention of possibly living persons.
  
• We have deleted entries with no data, i.e., if gravesites 2, 3, and 4 of a given section were numbered, but no entry was made, we simply omitted mention of those sites.
  
• When the surname was omitted in the entry, but implied by the surrounding names, we have supplied the missing surname and added an asterisk, for example, "Floyd*, Sadie."
  
• We have converted all dates to a standard format, namely DD Mmm YYYY. That was done because the dates were recorded in a variety of sometimes ambiguous shorthand forms. For example, 1-28-86 could mean 28 Jan 1886 or 28 Jan 1986. We could determine by independent means which century was correct, but the reader of our re-transcription could not. In all cases when the deduced century turned out to be the 1800s, we added an asterisk to the date, for example, 28 Jan 1886*.
  
• We have recorded all dates as "date of death/burial" because in most cases, there is no way to tell which it is. In those cases that we could check, most but not all turned out to be date of burial.
  
• We have moved all information which is not a name, date of death/burial, or gravesite location to a "Comments" column. In that column, we have used square brackets [ ] to enclose notes added by our transcribers. Otherwise, the information is given verbatim, parentheses, capitalization and all.
  
• We have catenated the gravesite information into a single field (see plot map). For example, D2-W-6-9 means (in the terminology used by St. Michael Cemetery) Dormitory 2 West, Section 6, Space 9. In Dormitories 17-20 there is a central area in addition to the East and West areas. In the central area, the graves are laid out in north-south "Rows", so the designation there is, for example, D18-R-3-7. There are special areas for veterans and priests; example designations there are Vet---32 and D18-P-3-3, respectively. When there is more than one burial in a space - a frequent occurrence - we have added a suffix .1, .2, .3 etc. to the space. The cemetery has also used suffixes A, B, etc., so the space sometimes has a complicated form like 6A.2 for sites with multiple burials.
  

Symbols and Abbreviations

• [ ] Brackets enclose comments of the transcribers.
  
• * Asterisk on a surname, denotes a name implied but not explicit in the data. On a date, denotes a year determined to be in the 1800s when the century was not explicit in the data.
  
• CADI: California Death Index, an online listing of all deaths in California from 1940-1997.
  
• SSDI: an online listing of Social Security recipients who died after the mid 1960s. This database is available from Ancestry.com, which can be accessed for free from many public libraries.
  
• Stone: Data from the decedent's gravestone, found at the L-AGS survey of St. Michael gravestones.
  
• Bunshah Index: An index to Livermore newspapers, available on CD-ROM from The Livermore Public Library.

Search Methods

The recommended method of accessing the burial information is to use the Name Index to St. Michael Cemetery Burial Records. A name found in this index is clickable, leading directly to the data about the person sought. An alternate method is to return to the L-AGS Home Page, enter the name of interest in the site-wide search engine. Any hits will lead to the top of one of six Web pages, each of which covers one part of the cemetery. The browser's "Find" function should then be used to locate the name on the page. The advantage of this approach is that it will also locate given names and names in the Comments column of the records.

Within each of the six Web pages, the records are sorted by grave location, so that a burial can be viewed in context, that is, so that the all-important information about who is buried nearby is easily seen. The six Web pages can be accessed directly from the following list:

Dormitories 1E to 7W
Dormitories 8E to 13E
Dormitories 13W to Veterans
Dormitories 17E to 19E
Dormitories 19R to 22E
Dormitories 22W to 26W

Name Index to St. Michael Cemetery Burial Records
Plot map of St. Michael Cemetery
Location map for St. Michael Cemetery