While researching former cemeteries (Quaker, Methodist) removed in the
vicinity of "marble vaults" two there and in operation (once contained
President Monroe, Swedish designer of the ship propeller, Erickson,
both returned to other places), in the NYC Bowery (named after Peter
Stuyvesant's nearby farm in Dutch "bouwerie") I came across the only
legal mandate I've seen in New York State (other than the American
coroner's notification practiced almost everywhere, or face severe
penalty of tampering with a crime scene).

One of these locations, just north of Houston Street ("howston" in NYC
a Scottish merchant) were replaced with a courthouse building (across
from one of not the two marble vaults, not yet perhaps removed) on top
of the churchyard that had accompanied a Methodist church. In the
excavation of the building I think a burial which had not been removed
in the winter of 1853(?) to Long Island (a large cemetery there
straddling two counties to circumvent the law recently passed limiting
their size, the Quakers to what became Prospect Park in Brooklyn on
the Coney Island Road) about 1880's or 1890's this happened. It
required a special session in the New York State Legislature,
authorizing the removal by the Department of Education, supervised by
the Board of Regents. The action was passed however the records of the
hearting were lost in an archives file shortly thereafter. I have not
had the time or funds to track down what exactly the session was
about, nor do I know what was done with the remains, or the nature of
them. I was given the impression that subsequently all similar
circumstances might require a separate session, though that seems odd,
though the large general movement of the former, "non-vault"
cemeteries had been legislated too.

As far as I know, there has been no rules set up in New York State,
and I was advised that the Iroquois Council recommends none of them
should be moved, at least in regards to the ones on top of the new
salt mines found near Letchworth State Park in Western NY after the
salt mines on Lake Cayuga, near Myers, NY, collapsed and flooded.

I did work on some in City Hall Park part of New York's "First
Almshouse" that was supervised by physical anthropologist Marilyn
London of the Smithsonian. There has been  a "bone of contention" of
the handling of remains in New York City with many qualified people
right here in it, though many of the issues have "gone elsewhere".

My own observations on this matter however, (photographing them from a
ladder with a grid of aluminum and strings over them in a Dutch
Reformed Cemetery on the Hudson River; connected with others
indirectly at Watervliet Shaker Community in Kettering, Ohio, from the
'original' Watervliet, NY, settled by the Shaker Society or "Family"
in New York State and formed in 1776; the public cemetery in Paramus,
NJ where a county M.E. was brought up on fraud charges for not moving
them "correctly" if at all, and died before his trial, according to J
Geismar, Ph.D.,; some the human remains found at Sacketts Harbor, NY
once the largest military settlement in the new American nation, on
Lake Ontario, where later in 1831, Dr. Samuel Guthrie distilled
"chloroform" and refined "glucose" from potato starch) is that there
have been no standards per se set and should be and will be.

"Famous First Facts," Joseph Nathan Kane c) 1973