African American Graveyards of Frederick County
This page contains links to alphabetical lists of the tombstone information for individual African American cemeteries in Frederick County.
While the 1966 two volume work, Names in Stone, by Jacob Mehrling Holdcraft contains information on over 75,000 individual tombstones in Frederick County, only a handful of those individuals listed are African American. In general, most of the cemeteries in the county are either all white or all black. None of the latter were included by Holdcraft. Names in Stone only contains the names of blacks who had tombstones in the relatively rare instances of mixed racial cemeteries, such as that of St. Mary's Catholic Church Cemetery in Petersville.
A long-term goal of Frederick Roots is to compile lists of tombstone information for each of the African American cemeteries of Frederick County. For the present, however, this effort will be limited to those cemeteries currently under study. Contributions of listings from other cemeteries, however, would be gladly accepted and will be published here with proper credit to the researcher who collected the data. Please use the Contact link if you would like to participate to this effort.
Our procedure in documenting tombstone information is first to take pictures of all of the tombstones in a given cemetery, paying special attention (rubbings and other non-destructive visualization techniques) to those that are difficult to read. The information from that work is then transcribed in alphabetized tabular form for publication here. Consequently, we have in our records pictures of each tombstone and, for limited requests, would be happy to share pictures with family members. Given the number of tombstones involved, however, we are not able at this time to post pictures of all tombstones surveyed.
Click on the link below to see an alphabetical listing of tombstone information for a cemetery. If you find errors in any of the data, please inform us by using the Contact link at the bottom of the page.
For the convenience of users of this site, we have copied below, in addition to our data, a number of listings from the www.interment.net website. We give full credit to that organization and the individuals who have contributed to that site the product of their tireless labor recording tombstone information. We strongly encourage you to visit www.interment.net, where you will find a huge collection of cemetery information from across the country.
Hope Hill M.E. Church Cemetery
Keys Chapel M.E. Church Cemetery*
Mt. Olive M.E. Church Cemetery*
Laboring Sons Memorial Cemetery
"Point of Rocks" African-American Cemetery
Wayman-Silver Hill M.E. Churches Cemetery
* Cemeteries that Frederick Roots has documented.