During the late 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) completed numerous public works projects as part of the New Deal program. One such project commonly referred to as the “WPA Tombstone or Cemetery Records Project” engaged workers in recording information from tombstones located in cemeteries across the United States. This extremely important work, served to document and preserve information from old and deteriorating tombstones to provide a record of names, birth and death dates, family member information, and iconography, ensuring the existence of important personal and historical information. Some of the earliest tombstone inscriptions date back to the late 1700s. The physical tombstone very well may no longer be in existence, having been lost over time.
The South Carolina State Library recently completed a digitization project related to these records of tombstones in cemeteries located in South Carolina. The “Works Progress Administration (WPA) Transcripts of Tombstone Inscriptions in South Carolina” digitization project consists of 67 pages of records of microfiche negatives, each negative contains numerous individual transcriptions. Local chapters of the South Carolina Genealogical Society transcribed volumes of the WPA record inscriptions from the 1930s while the South Carolina Historical Society created the microfiche records of the original WPA documents in 1981.
The “Works Progress Administration (WPA) Transcripts of Tombstone Inscriptions in South Carolina” project is a collection of thousands of cemetery tombstone transcriptions, handwritten or typed on individual cards, arranged alphabetically by surname. These transcriptions represent nearly 4,000 individuals buried in 350 historical cemeteries across the state of South Carolina. The original handwritten or typescript cards are held in the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society at the College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina. The microfiche slides are arranged by county and cemetery and are held in the collections of the South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
We are proud of our contribution to this important work and believe having these records digitized and available on a wider scale will be useful for genealogists and others who are interested in individual or family history, and the history of South Carolina.
"Works Progress Administration (WPA) Transcripts of Tombstone Inscriptions in South Carolina" can be viewed
in our Digital Collections at https://dc.statelibrary.sc.gov/collections/b52c0a38-7bdc-4422-9093-e6a333f41640.
