If you purchase a plot at Friendship Cemetery, you could run into one of two problems.
Someone else could already own the plot, or maybe, someone else could already be buried there.
With more than a century of both paper and digital records to dig through, there’s really no way to know for certain whether a plot is occupied, Cemetery Director Rogena Bonner told The Dispatch.
“Once we get the names on all the lots and everything situated then … we may be able to give an accurate number (of available plots),” she said. “But based on what we have right now, what’s been done in the past, we’re going to lie to you. And I don’t want to lie to the public.”
The issues stem from a system of potentially fragmented record keeping for the 177-year-old city-owned cemetery, with ownership records existing in a combination of an Excel spreadsheet and aged bound ledger books. The result is a cemetery with plots for sale that may already contain an interred body.
The challenge isn’t unique to Friendship Cemetery. Randy Jones, chief administrative officer for West Point, said the city sees similar issues with records for its Greenwood Cemetery, which has graves dating back to at least the 19th century.
For Greenwood Cemetery, plot availability is verified by cross-checking records of the cemetery’s ward and block layout. If everything lines up there, staff verify a plot is empty by visiting it physically.
While Jones said the city hasn’t run into any major issues, it’s not a foolproof system.
“If you’re looking at an existing (plot with) several grave sites for a family, there’s nothing that really tells you by name where they are,” he said.
Bonner said the process is similar for Friendship, beginning with a cross-check between cemetery records in bound books and a master spreadsheet. If both records indicate a plot is available, the city then investigates the site itself, she said.
“What I’ll do is, I’ll pull that lot number, and I’ll say, ‘OK well (the spreadsheet) does say it is available,’” Bonner said. “Then that leads us to go out and poke, or we get the grave digger to kind of break ground to see if that grave is available. If it’s available, then we can sell it.”
Even then, Bonner said there’s no guarantee an old plot is unoccupied, especially on the southernmost “historic” side, founded in 1849. The “newer side” of the cemetery has more reliable records, she said, but still not perfect.
“When you’re dealing with the historical side of the cemetery, we’re probably going to run into that a lot,” she said. “That may be a good reason why we shouldn’t be selling anything that’s left on that side. But there are a few over there.”
The risk of that uncertainty became clear in February 2025 when funeral workers preparing a grave for burial discovered four metallic caskets, likely to be Fisk coffins dating back to the 1800s, buried at the grave site.
Mayor Stephen Jones said that situation – though the city reimbursed the family for the plot – exemplifies exactly how little is known about who is buried on the historic side of Friendship.
“Unless you dig and you find something, that’s the only way you’re going to know something is there if nothing’s marked there,” Mayor Jones told The Dispatch. “It’s no different than when somebody is getting ready to develop a plot of land; they don’t know if a body might be there from the 1500s. There’s no way of knowing unless you just run up on it.”
Who owns what?
The plot where the Fisk coffins were buried, Bonner said, was bought through a private sale, which can sometimes compound the issue of uncertain ownership.
Within her master spreadsheet, which includes more than 22,000 cells denoting grave sites, Bonner records which plots the city owns and which are privately owned. But when privately owned plots are sold between families without the city knowing, the records fall further out of date.
“We always tell people if you’re going to sell something, make sure you make us aware,” Bonner said. “We don’t have anything to do with how much you purchase it for. We don’t have anything to do with any of that. The only thing we have to do is to make sure that the records reflect that it is no longer with the original owner.”
Cindy Goode, chancery clerk for Lowndes County, confirmed all land transactions, including those involving cemetery deeds for Friendship, are recorded through her office, though those records aren’t shared directly with the city.
“They’re all public,” she said. “Everything on (the Lowndes County digital official records portal) is public record. You’re able to make a copy from your home or from your office.”
Potential solutions
Before implementing a burial rights and cemetery policy in 2022, Starkville Mayor Lynn Spruill said the city faced issues of uncertain ownership for deeds and headstones within the two Odd Fellows cemeteries it operates on University and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. drives.
The policy requires anyone hoping to acquire a plot to provide proof to the city that it is abandoned – with no ownership activity for more than 100 years – by researching its deed history themselves. If a plot is found to be occupied under the policy, the owner may withdraw from interment (not to be buried there) or may accept a double interment, leaving the existing remains with the proposed remains.
“We’ve got some decent records, but we also have people who are dead or we don’t know where they are,” Spruill said. “So that’s why we put the policy in place.”
The city has also worked with Golden Triangle Planning and Development District to map the headstones at Odd Fellows. GTPDD has mapped seven cemeteries across the region, though none located in Lowndes County.
“We’ve used as much as we can use to try to make those determinations (about occupied plots),” Spruill said.
Records for Sandfield Cemetery, the oldest African American cemetery in Columbus, which is also owned by the city, are also incomplete. The city hopes to partner with Mississippi State University’s anthropology department at low to no cost to map the graves there using ground-penetrating radar.
Bonner said she’s spoken with representatives from Fulgham Tree Preservation about a similar solution for Friendship. The Tupelo-based company is currently conducting a survey of the trees at Friendship and has given the city a roughly $2,000 estimate to add headstone mapping to the survey, though the city would also have to pay annually to keep that information up to date, Susan Wilder, the city’s grant writer, told The Dispatch.
Ground-penetrating radar for a large municipal cemetery like Friendship could run in the tens of thousands of dollars, according to websites for several companies that provide that service. Clayton Fulgham, with Fulgham Tree Preservation, said his company doesn’t typically use that technology on that scale, but he estimated he would charge roughly $40,000 or so for such an extensive job.
Stephen Jones said the city also aims to seek an estimate from Golden Triangle Planning Development District. With that information, he hopes citizens – or even people outside of Columbus hoping to research their own genealogy – could search records without ever stepping foot in the cemetery.
“I want to see it all online,” he said. “It’s one of my priorities to get it online. In the next year or so? I don’t know, but that is something that I’d like to see us do.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 28 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
