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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Tuckerton Old Home Society

The May 14, 2012 Blog entry dealt with the formation of the Greenwood Cemetery Society in 1928. Click on the photo of Greenwood Cemetery below to read the May 14, 2012 Blog entry.


It concluded with the following paragraph dealing with a transformation to the Tuckerton Old Home Society.

The Greenwood Cemetery Society sometime back morphed into the Tuckerton Old Home Society which maintains Greenwood Cemetery today. I am unaware of when and how this happened. Perhaps someone out in the Blog-O-Sphere, can shed some light on the situation.

The "Old Home Society" was a common area name for local cemetery organizations. It's derivation comes from the nature of the society's origin. Many local family members were buried in the local cemetery but surviving family members had since moved to a different town, county, or state. They still cherished their roots and wanted to be sure that their ancestors burial place was kept in a respectful manner. Since the cemetery was in their old family home, the newly formed organization was named the "Old Home Society". Two prominent examples that still exist today are the New Gretna Old Home Society which maintains Miller and Hillside cemeteries in New Gretna and the Tuckerton Old Home Society which maintains Greenwood cemetery on North Green Street in Tuckerton.

Click on the photo above to read the June 9, 2010 Blog
on the New Gretna Old Home Society.


I knew little about the Tuckerton Old Home Society when I wrote the May 14, 2012 Blog entry on the Greenwood Cemetery Society but have since found a Tuckerton Beacon article dealing with the formation of the Tuckerton Old Home Society. Unfortunately, the article was undated, but I believe it was probably written sometime in the early 1930's. Should anyone out in the Blog-O-Sphere have any knowledge of the date of the Tuckerton Old Home Society's founding, I would appreciate hearing from you.

The article is a great snapshot of the local Tuckerton families who were members of the new organization. I'm sure that some of our Blog readers have family members on the membership list.

The article begins with a statement that the Society was formed to provide perpetual and annual care for the cemetery and illustrates the wide reach of it's membership throughout the country.


It continues by showing the effort the new organization made to enroll members. They seemed to have really beaten the bushes for members!


Finally, the article lists those early members of the Society by the following categories: Life members, Annual Care Members, and Perpetual Care members.


It would be interesting to walk through Greenwood Cemetery and look for tombstones of those families on the above list. I wonder how many are resting there.

Pete S

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