The first organized recording of Howard County tombstone inscriptions was done in 1958-60, when the Colonel Thomas Dorsey Chapter of the DAR inventoried twenty-one burial sites and published the information in Tombstone Inscriptions from a Few Cemeteries in Howard County, Maryland. The Howard County Genealogical Society, founded in 1976, has continued this project, publishing eight volumes of cemetery records between 1979 and 1993. In 1994, in compliance with County Council Bill 13-1993, the Department of Planning and Zoning in cooperation with the Cemetery Preservation Advisory Board issued the Howard County Cemeteries and Gravesites Inventory (subsequently updated in late 1995 and amended in 1998). That list of all known burial sites in the county was utilized in the ninth and final volume of tombstone inscriptions published in 2001.An index to the names of the interments in all nine volumes plus the DAR book was compiled and published in 2001, and contains about 16,000 names. An index to the cemeteries themselves was compiled in 2010, and correlates the cemetery names, addresses, county inventory numbers, and HCGS cemetery volumes.  

 

A number of cemeteries listed in the county inventory are not included in our books for one of the following reasons: (1) Howard County has undergone very rapid development since 1960, and some known burial sites have been destroyed during road and building construction (new laws safeguard against this practice today); (2) some sites have no remaining stones; (3) some of the historic black cemeteries of HC were being recorded by Beulah Buckner for a book she planned to publish, and we did not duplicate her efforts; (4) in a very few cases, we were not granted permission to enter private property to record the inscriptions. A decision was made in the early years of the project to record only pre-1920 inscriptions, since our primary purpose was to preserve the information from old stones before it was lost to weather, vandalism and development. For that reason, we have not included the large, relatively recent, commercial cemeteries in the county - Crest Lawn Memorial Gardens, Meadowridge Memorial Park and Columbia Memorial Park. (The entry for Meadowridge found in Volume VI includes only the inscriptions from stones moved there from an old burial plot.) All cemeteries in Volume IX were completely recorded regardless of date.

 

When using the cemetery locations given in our earlier volumes, the researcher needs to keep in mind the rapid change in Howard County from rural to suburban; old roads have been relocated and new ones built, family farms are now housing or commercial developments. An example is the location given for the "Dorsey, Owings, Waters Gravestones" in Volume I, described as "in middle of a field with tall grass," just prior to the intersection of Route 175 with Snowden River Parkway. It is now at the edge of the parking lot of the Lone Star Steakhouse on Stanford Blvd. in Columbia!

 

The tombstone inscriptions in each book are ordered by election district. When a small number of stones is listed, the name of the cemetery is generally the name which appears on the majority of the stones. If the cemetery, no matter what size, is known by a specific name, then that title is used.  Footstones were recorded only if no corresponding headstone was found. In some cases a small epitaph is included, especially if it had genealogical or biographical information.

 

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