Project Background and Methods

The long term goal is conduct an  physical survey of the cemetery documenting the existing headstones and plots, then merge all of the duplicated inventory lists  and the historic maps to create a comprehensive data base for the City of Williams to manage.

There are roughly over 3000 people listed amongst the 3 different lists of interred individual at the cemetery.  These  lists include two different headstone inventories conducted in the 1980s (see Find-a-Grave) and a list of individuals that the City maintains in a database.  Also the headstone inventories were of only the IOOF and KP Sections of the cemetery.   In some cases, the same individual names was listed on all 3 lists, but the information associated with the names was not the same.  Or there were individuals named on one list and not the other two.  Therefore the first task was to merge all 3 of the lists of internments into one comprehensive table.  See merged table below.

Further complicating the situation was that each headstone inventory project, there were two, created its own mapping system to identify the location of the plots. However this location information was never compared to the maps the city maintained to manage the location of the plots. 

In 2025 4 handwritten maps that were housed in the office of the City of Williams were photographed in detail.   These maps were of the older IOOF and KP sections of the cemetery  (copies of these maps are located below). The hand written IOOF and KP maps were the primary source used by the city to track interments and ownership of individual and family plots in those sections of the cemetery.   The Mason's section of the cemetery was established in 1984 and has rough digital maps that appear to have been created in the late 1990s.   Those maps will be added to this website in the near future.

Using the Historic maps the city created an identification systems based on the roads and blocks of plots.  See Williams Cemetery Meta Data below.  This is the system that will be used as part of this project.

It is expected that there will be a lot of conflicting information between these various sources, therefore the next steps of the project is to validate the information by looking at the locations on the ground.  The form located below will be used to capture basic information, such as names and other headstone information, location information, and a box to place a digital photo of the plot.  The forms will be uploaded and the data on the forms will automatically populate the table listed below and the locations of the individual and family plots will be checked against the existing maps and updated as needed.

Finally, effort will be made to identify further historic records about the cemetery maintained by the service organizations, look for as many living descents of the interred as possible and collect stories about the lives of the people interred at the cemetery. We will also try to check and list other sources of information including obituaries, death records, newspaper articles and photos.

Looking for a loved one or an ancestor thought to be buried in the Mountain View Cemetery and Can Not Find them?  Contact us at williamshistoryaz@gmail.com