Newark, New Jersey Cemeteries
(Plus ones that were used by Newark residents)

The original Old Burying Ground in downtown Newark was about two and a third acres. As the cemetery grew, Newark officials (1828) purchased a burial place in the eastern end of town and residents were given the opportunity to rebury their ancestors to this new cemetery without expense. In the following decades, the grass and shrubbery of the Old Burying Ground were trampled under and the headstones were scattered, defaced or broken. In 1858 the common council prohibited any more internments in the Old Burying Ground and forbade the establishment of new cemeteries within the Watch and Lamp District. The new cemeteries were placed at least a mile away from the population center for health reasons (the belief that the corpses poisoned the air with their emanations causing Yellow Fever). These new cemeteries were built to also serve the living by providing shade walks, forest groves, shrubbery and flowers where people could go to find sanctuary from the maelstrom of daily life through spiritual and aesthetic repose.

From "Hand book and guide for the city of Newark, New Jersey: carefully edited and compiled from authentic sources" Newark Daily Advertiser Print, 1872:

"Though many of the churches in the city are still surrounded by their old graveyards, internments have long ceased to be made in them. The rural cemetery has superseded all other forms of sepulture, as being not only better adapted to the purpose, but as affording greater certainty that the remains of the dead will remain undisturbed by the extension of the city."

The New Jersey State Cemetery Board
124 Halsey Street
PO Box 45036
Newark, New Jersey 0710
973-504-6553.

Photos

1900 Map of Newark showing the Cemeteries
(the map is just a reference, some cemeteries may or may not have been around in 1900)

An Ordinance Regulating Interments of the Dead (December, 1, 1837)

Burial records for the Secaucus Potters Field

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