Reissued: Amy Barry, Stories from Utah’s Cemeteries Database (S1, E7 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. My name is Brad Westwood. I'm Senior Public Historian at the Utah Dept. of Heritage and Arts. The past is never truly in the past. It's all around us. It informs us, it speaks to both our shared and to our separate identities. Speak Your Piece is a podcast where writers, historians, and contributors to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries.
When you're looking forward, planning for the future, we highly recommend you first examine carefully the past. This is what this podcast strives to do for Utah for its many diverse geographically varied communities. If there is one place, one podcast to get your Utah history, this is the place.
Today's guest is Amy Barry from the Utah Division of State History. She's the program manager for the state cemetery and burial database. Amy has managed the Utah Cemetery and Burial Program at Utah State History for almost five years.
Where has it been past five years, Amy?

**Amy Barry** (1:11)
Well, it's coming up on five.

**Brad Westwood** (1:13)
I thought so. I remember when you came on board.
Amy enjoys finding ways to bring history alive and making it interesting. She has a background in public administration and likes to use those skills to make government more accessible to everyone. Before this position, Amy spent a lot of time in cemeteries and now she enjoys having a professional reason to be there. Welcome, Amy Barry, to Speak Your Piece.

**Amy Barry** (1:38)
Thank you.

**Brad Westwood** (1:39)
I'm going to ask you to first tell us a bit about the website, also the site location, the URL.

**Amy Barry** (1:50)
Yeah. So people can visit our website at history.utah.gov forward slash cemeteries.
They'll specifically get linked to find a person, find a cemetery. The Utah Burials Database is unique because no other state does this, but I am mandated by the state to collect burial information from the cemeteries and put it in a searchable database and also to maintain a list of all the cemeteries in Utah. I do like to say that my job will never be done. So it's never complete and it's never 100% accurate, but it is a growing list and a work in progress at all times.

**Brad Westwood** (2:31)
Amy, what's the breadth and depth? Give us some of the statistics and numbers related to it.

**Amy Barry** (2:37)
Yeah, so our total number of records as of this morning was 690,945 burial records in that database.
Since I started in April of 2015, I have added over 98,000. But I've also taken a different approach.
Instead of only quantity, but also quality, I've done some reworking of the fields that are available to the public. So I track records that I update and try to make them more complete, fill in dates and locations and relationships. And if there are veterans, what wars they've served in. So I've updated in that time over 49,000 burial records. So it's something I'm constantly working on. It's not my full-time job. It's only about part-time of my efforts. So I'm a program of one and it's half time.

**Brad Westwood** (3:32)
And you're a web. You deal with the website for the Division of State History.

**Amy Barry** (3:37)
Yes, I also maintain the website.
And I do a lot of multimedia communication focused type stuff for state history. So we also have as of this morning, 621 cemeteries in the state.

**Brad Westwood** (3:53)
621

**Amy Barry** (3:54)
Now this is reflecting a lot of individual burials that somebody got buried on a mountain or they were trekking to some town and people died along the way and they buried them. Family cemeteries. So that is also growing because there are, we have a researcher who helps me try to identify some of those unknowns to the database and add those in.
We also track cemeteries that are abandoned.
So they can be a burial of one, and we call it a cemetery, or it can be a small burial cemetery for families of five or whatever. So we track all different levels. And we track private, active cemeteries, and inactive, which is kind of a fluid term because they could still be burying, but they're not selling or they're not taking on new plots, but they have plots that are purchased but not occupied. So there's a lot of different types of status. Some people call those closed, but there are still burials happening.

**Brad Westwood** (5:06)
So your database deals with municipal, federal, private, one burial all the way to thousands of burials. And you said we're the only state that does this. There's so many places with all the interest in genealogy and family history.