Transfer Records, 1864-1986 | The Green-Wood Cemetery

The Transfer Records series contains the legal documents required for the transfer of lot ownership from one party to another; most of which are bound into large volumes. The documents bound within are conveyance records, which legally transfer ownership of a lot in Green-Wood Cemetery from one person to another. The documents are notarized, and give information such as the name and address of the original owner, the name and address of the new owner, how much was paid for the conveyance, the date on which the transaction took place, and occasionally the relationship between the previous and the new owner. (This is less common.)

Most of the documents are standard forms filled out with handwritten or typed information and many are marked as duplicates of the original legal record. Typically, this is the only document that a given record will contain, although other important material has been found within the Transfer Files, such as copies of wills, affidavits, family- and cemetery-related correspondence, lot diagrams, and ephemeral materials. The additional records relate to or expand upon the legal record of ownership transfer, and were therefore filed with the document.

The bulk of the records are bound into volumes, with a number assigned to each record within the book. The documents are in descending order according to the number they have been assigned. While the documents are most likely in the order in which they were received and filed by Green-Wood Cemetery, most of the early documents are not marked with the date of filing, and the only true order appears to be the number the records were assigned at the time of filing. Records numbered 8967 and higher—dated from approximately 1940 onward—are unbound but continue the numbering system established in the earlier volumes. These records correspond with the Green-Wood Lot Books, which reference specific transfer numbers when a record exists within this series.

The transfer records from 1864-1887 are contained in bound volumes with the same type of material, but the books appear to have been bound much earlier than the bulk of the records, and are in damaged condition. They are arranged largely chronologically by the date of transfer, although some documents are not strictly in order, suggesting that they, too, are ordered by the date they were filed at Green-Wood rather than the date the document was created. There is no numbering system. Although the earlier books are marked as transfer duplicates, and date range overlaps that of the other transfer records, the records are unique to the subseries.