A research request today for help finding the burial in Salem’s Catholic Cemetery.  The death record recorded the burial at Salem’s Catholic Cemetery and the church register at St Joseph’s Cemetery.

The 1911 City directory lists the Catholic Cemetery as located on S Commercial 1 1/2 mile south of the city limits.  It also lists a Catholic Cemetery Association with offices at 751 Chemeketa St. (William Kaiser, President; Frank Albrich, Secretary; and Theodore M. Barr, Treasurer), the current location of St. Joseph’s Church.

A quick look through the Oregon Burial Site Guide, indicates that the current St. Barbara’s Cemetery (now located on Liberty Road South) was at one time called both St. Joseph’s Cemetery and the Salem Catholic Cemetery.  This matches with the description given in the 1911 City Directory.

A look through our Cemetery files and we found a copy of a 1958 LDS publication which lists a record of Interments for the St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Salem from 1889-1933, The Death Register for St. Joseph’s Church 1925-1952, and the St. Barbara’s Cemetery Row list 1917-1954.  Comparing notes with our researcher who had already talked to St. Joseph’s Church, it appears that the St. Joseph’s internment is a transcription of the handwritten records held by the church and include name, place of birth, age, date of death, date of burial, name of priest, cemetery and disease and other remarks.  Luckily for us, this publication was indexed and we were able to find our man.

Although, some of the burial records for St. Barbara’s Church are online: Oregongravestones.org, Find-A-Grave, and US GenWeb Tombstone Project, the individual we were looking for did not appear in these online records.