The Conneautville Cemetery, located north of the business district on Route 18, was donated to the borough of Conneautville for a burial ground by James A. Power in 1835. James was a son of Alexander Power, founder of Conneautville. His stipulation was that a church be built on the property. A log structure was erected (probably in Section A) and used by both the Presbyterian and Methodist memberships, but the building was never completed. (This building was moved to the present location of St. Peter’s Church and was used for an academy.)
The first burial in the cemetery in 1836 was William Foster, son of George and Margaret Power Foster.
In 1864 the cemetery was enlarged and in 1887 five more acres were purchased from James A. Power.
This cemetery is maintained by the Conneautville Cemetery Association.
The index on this site is by no means conclusive but a work in progress. Several sources were used and (believe it or not) no two sources agree as far as the spelling of the names or the dates go. An effort has been made to provide accurate dates and if in doubt, you will see two (2) dates listed for a particular event. If you have a birth or death certificate with the correct dates for any of these individuals, please contact Pat Vedner (vedner@cvahs.org).
The sources used were:
Cemetery records from the Conneautville Cemetery Association (both records and walk-throughs);
Obituaries from local newspapers;
Scrapbooks (of newspaper clippings) kept by individuals in the community;
A previous index of the cemetery (during the 1960’s) kept by the Crawford County Historical Society in Meadville; and
Death certificates held by some family members.
See the map grid below. Most of the names indexed will indicate the burial site by using a “Section” (alpha character) and a “Row” (numeric) number. If there are no numbers indicated, then it is believed the individual is buried in the cemetery and either the gravestone is not readable or there is no gravestone marking the grave.
It should be noted that in a lot of cases, males were buried in their wife’s family plot and sometimes we found that his first name was indicated on a stone but initial indexes of the cemetery by others listed him with his wife’s surname rather than his own. Again, if you see this happening in your family, please let us know so we can correct the errors in record keeping. This also happened when an infant did not survive and was buried in the maternal grandparent’s plot listing their surname but not the child’s surname.
The Secretary of the Conneautville Cemetery Association has advised us that if you have an old cemetery deed, the plot numbers on the deed may not agree with the section and row numbers you currently see. Early deeds indicated “north/south or east/west” indicators rather than by sections.
If you are coming to Conneautville to “visit”, please let us know -- we will be glad to assist you with your Conneautville Cemetery research.