Ghostly archive
Finding & Making Gravestone Recipes
Gravestone Research Resources
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Find the graves of ancestors, create virtual memorials or add photos, virtual flowers and a note to a loved one’s memorial. Search or browse cemeteries and grave records for every-day and famous people from around the world.
Cemetery Census is a free website that hosts photos and transcribed cemetery records from Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio,
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#Gravetok features social media videos of the histories of burial sites, cleaning headstones, and other stories around gravestones and cemeteries.
Atlas Obscura is a guide to the world’s hidden wonders and features hundreds of stories of cemeteries around the world.
Name index of burial records courtesy of BillionGraves which is an expansive family history database of records and images from the world’s cemeteries.
Obituary Daily Times (indexed through Roots Web) database. The database has entries that give information about obituaries that appeared in publications around the world.
Recipe Gravestone Features
Carrot Cake
I visited Christine Hammill’s cemetery on a warm May day after a long drive through the California Redwoods. I’d heard about a mysterious carrot cake recipe through social media comments over a two year span.
Snickerdoodle Cookies
Among her many legacies, Annabell left a sweet surprise for those who visited her final resting place – her beloved snickerdoodle cookie recipe engraved on her gravestone.
Let’s Connect
Follow the journey on Tiktok and Instagram
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people have put recipes on their gravestones?
So far I know of 25 people who put a recipe on their gravestone. In 2 cases their gravestone just mentions their recipe; some graves mention the full recipe with instructions and others just list the ingredients.
Where are they located?
They mostly are based around North America, ranging from Nome, Alaska to Weld, Maine. The 2 gravestone recipes outside of the US are located in Israel.
How old are these recipe gravestone
These are modern graves, the oldest is from 1994.
How did you come across them?
All of these recipe graves I found through crowdsourcing: they were featured in blogs about cemeteries, travel accounts, on social media, or the families themselves reached out with photos and stories of their loved one’s grave.
Is this a new trend in cemeteries?
Recipes on gravestones doesn’t exactly seem to be a trend, a lot of the families interviewed didn’t know there were others out there, but it does seem to be a trend in modern gravestones (particularly in the US) becoming much more personalized and reflect something important in a person’s life.