Prison Cemeteries - Death dates or burial dates?

[debwallsmith]

A random thought that came to me while searching for info on Camp Lawton/Millen POWs - do we KNOW (is there documentation) whether the dates posted for burials at prison cemeteries are the day they died or the burial date? I realize it probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but I was curious as to whether there was a standard for recording death dates either at individual prisons or universally.

 

[7thWisconsin]

The American custom is to publish the date of death. I don´t see any reason why it wouldn´t be carried through to prison cemeteries.

 

[debwallsmith]

The American custom is to publish the date of death. I don´t see any reason why it wouldn´t be carried through to prison cemeteries.

Many of the findagrave records I've examined have the interment date although that's the exception not the rule. When it comes to the prisons, at least at both Andersonville and Millen, there are reports that the dead were removed from the stockade in the morning and piled up for removal to the cemetery, meaning that some of them died the previous night.

 

[Gary Morgan]

A random thought that came to me while searching for info on Camp Lawton/Millen POWs - do we KNOW (is there documentation) whether the dates posted for burials at prison cemeteries are the day they died or the burial date? I realize it probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but I was curious as to whether there was a standard for recording death dates either at individual prisons or universally.

Sort of both. It depended on the time of day you died. At Andersonville, if it was late in the day, they'd leave your body stacked up by the South Gate until the following day, then bring it to Dead House to be recorded before carting it off to the cemetery. If you died early in the day, you'd be buried that day and so the dates of death and burial would be the same; if you died in the evening, your death was recorded the following day, so it was your burial date that was written down.

A prime example of this is the Andersonville Raiders, who were hanged around 5 o'clock in the evening on July 11, 1864, but they're listed in the Death Register as dying on July 12th, because that's when their bodies were logged in at the Dead House, and that's when they were buried.

 

[debwallsmith]

Sort of both. It depended on the time of day you died. At Andersonville, if it was late in the day, they'd leave your body stacked up by the South Gate until the following day, then bring it to Dead House to be recorded before carting it off to the cemetery. If you died early in the day, you'd be buried that day and so the dates of death and burial would be the same; if you died in the evening, your death was recorded the following day, so it was your burial date that was written down.

A prime example of this is the Andersonville Raiders, who were hanged around 5 o'clock in the evening on July 11, 1864, but they're listed in the Death Register as dying on July 12th, because that's when their bodies were logged in at the Dead House, and that's when they were buried.

Thanks, Gary. That's what I suspected but wanted confirmation. It didn't seem likely that there was a way of keeping track of exactly when someone died.