The investigation of our ancestors sometimes takes us to unusual places. We've all been on research trips to cemeteries to study and record tombstone inscriptions. How many of us, however, have taken our investigations to the written records that were created in order to bury our ancestors?

This week's "Along Those Lines . . ." column focuses on burial permits and other written records associated with the removal of the deceased person from the place of death to the place of burial or disposition. In the absence of death certificates, a burial or transit permit may provide information about the death of an ancestor.

Licences, Registrations, and Permits
Most municipalities have developed devices for tracking certain activities and for generating revenue to cover their administration. We are all familiar with birth certificates, marriage licenses and death certificates, but there are a wide variety of other activities that generate official documents. Certain businesses and occupations, for instance, require licenses. Today these include building contractors, barbers, beauticians, morticians and a variety of other occupations. Other activities involving paperwork and including fees are automobile registrations and the recording of deeds. Permits are required for many activities, including burial permits, cremation permits, and disinterment permits. These licenses and permits may be required and/or issued at a state, county, or municipal level. You just need to do some investigation to determine the location, the process, and whether copies still exist.

The Paperwork Process
The process concerning the remains of a deceased person has changed little over time. The usual practice today involves the certification and registration of an individual's death. This typically involves the issuance of a death certificate, followed by a mortuary taking custody of the body. Before the body may be buried in the same area or transported to another city, state, or country for final disposition, a burial and/or transit permit is issued. These documents accompany the corpse to the place of final interment. In the case of cremations, a cremation permit is issued and accompanies the corpse to the crematorium; a transit permit or similar document is created to accompany the ashes to a columbarium or to a custodian to handle final disposition of the ashes. These permits are usually prepared using multiple-copy forms so that copies may be retained by the local issuing authority and by the funeral director, a copy may accompany the corpse, and a copy may be retained by the receiving location, such as another state, county or country's authorities.

In some cases, once the remains of the deceased have been interred or otherwise disposed of, the accompanying transport and/or burial permit may be returned to the issuing agency. There they are often matched with the original so that the file can be closed. The documents may be maintained on file for some period of time and then destroyed. In other cases, mortuaries may have retained copies in their files, sometimes by date and other times in the individual files of the deceased along with a copy of the death certificate. In still other cases, a copy of the burial permit (and a transit permit if the remains came from another location) may be on file with the cemetery administration.

What Information do These Documents Contain?
I have created a Web page for this week's column at: http://ahaseminars.com/atl/permits.html It contains some examples of burial and transit permits, which illustrate the information in the following paragraphs.

Burial and transit permits, if you can locate them, can provide invaluable information to you. In the absence of a death certificate, a burial permit may provide you with the name of the deceased, the date of death, the age, the cause of death, the residence, and the location of interment. In addition, the permit may include the occupation and the place of birth. Some burial permits specify the precise cemetery lot and plot for the interment.

A transit permit may contain as little information as the deceased's name, date of death, the date of transit, and the destination. Others, such as the example from Passaic, NJ, contain extensive information, including the name of the physician signing the death certificate, the date and cause of death, the undertaker and the means of conveyance--in this case, by railroad.

These documents could point you to the residence of your ancestor in census or land and property records, to mortuary records, or to the cemetery where he or she was buried. These may provide the missing link in your research.

Where Should I look?
As mentioned earlier, these documents may or may not still exist. They may have been destroyed over time or as governments, morticians and cemeteries ran out of space. Often they were considered as temporary documents to facilitate the movement of a corpse through the transport and burial process. If the records exist, they are most often found in the cemeteries' or morticians' files. The examples in the Web page (http://ahaseminars.com/atl/permits.html) are some of many thousands of as yet unorganized records and correspondence in a large cemetery outside New York City. In other cemeteries, city cemetery sextons or church cemetery administrators may have well-organized files that may contain these types of documents.

Old city directories and governmental agencies' license records can provide information about mortuaries and cemeteries in use at the time your ancestor may have died. Old newspapers can also provide leads, especially among obituaries and death notices. Burial and transit permits may provide the only death information available for some of your ancestors, especially in the period before death certificates were required in some areas. They may also expand knowledge you already have previously uncovered. In any event, they are another possible record type often unknown and overlooked by researchers. Now you know about them and where you might look.

Copyright 1999 George G. Morgan. All rights reserved. "Along Those Lines . . ." is a weekly feature of the Genealogy Forum on America Online (Keyword: ROOTS). Visit George Morgan's Web page at: http://ahaseminars.com/atl. You may send e-mail to atl@ahaseminars.com. George Morgan would like to hear from you but, because of the volume of e-mail, is unable to personally respond to each letter individually. He also regrets that he cannot assist you with your personal genealogical research. George is also the author of "The Genealogy Forum on America Online," which is available in the Ancestry Online Store at: http://shop.myfamily.com/ancestrycatalog/
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