Dear list:

Has anyone out there ever tried to even roughly quantify, for a particular
time and place, what percentage of people that died made it into marked
graves, and what percentage of those graves survive to the present day?

For example, if 1000 people died in a rural southern county between 1870 and
1880, how many were buried in marked graves?  And how many of those graves
might still be identifiable?

This is obviously dependent on a whole host of factors, including
race/ethnicity, religion, economic factors, settlement history, etc., not to
mention the type of markers used, nature of subsequent development, etc.,
etc.  But does anyone have any rules of thumb, regression formulae, etc.
that they would like to share?

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Paul A. Webb
TRC Garrow Associates, Inc.
6340 Quadrangle Drive, Suite 200
Chapel Hill, NC   27514

(919) 419-7531
(919) 419-7501 fax

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