Mt. Lebanon Church & Cemetery

New sign at Mt. Lebanon Church - Feb 2008
March 2007 cleanup photo
Job Corps Students Work at Cemetery in 2006

It makes me extremely happy to have the Mt. Lebanon Church Cemetery listings and photographs online. I consider Mt. Lebanon my "home cemetery", if there is such a thing. Most of my ancestors and kinfolk are buried there and Bill and I will be buried there also. So this has been a very special project that I have been wanting to do since April 1996.

Mt. Lebanon Cemetery was first surveyed in 1988 by Tommy and Dorothy Oakley and Geneva Mattingly and Atwell Wood for the Webster County Historical and Genealogical Society. Their listing was to have been published in volume four of the Society's cemetery books but through an oversight it was omitted. (Since this web site went online, the Webster County H&G Society has published a fifth cemetery volume and the original Mt. Lebanon Cemetery listing is in the new volume.) A copy of the Oakley/Mattingly/Wood list was in the Dixon Library and that is where I first saw it in 1992. Two years ago I requested and received permission from the Society to publish the list on the Webster County KYGenWeb page.

Last year I also requested an updated list of burials at Mt. Lebanon from the secretary of the cemetery board, Sue Burton Johnson. Sue asked her friends Marian and Amy Dunn if they would help with updating the list. Marian and Amy did *way more* than update the list - in March they took their digital camera to the cemetery and began systematically photographing every stone in both the old and new sections of the cemetery. So the compilation you see here is an entirely new list - there are not only new burials since 1988, Marian and Amy discovered stones that had been overlooked in the earlier listing, as well as inscriptions that had been mis-recorded. Jonathan Dunn and Marian's mother, the late Joyce Floyd, also contributed of their time to the project. I was so happy to e-meet this family, who love this cemetery as much as my family does.

In this new listing, we are retaining the page numbers from the old listing in order to make it easier for those who are using a copy of the old listing to see the changes and additions. Names at the bottom of pages nine and seventeen, where the surname is enclosed in asterisks (*SURNAME*), indicate stones that have been put in place since 1988 OR stones that were recently discovered. Marian and Amy also found dates of death that have been engraved since 1988 and these have been added as well. Additionally, some dates of death were taken from obituaries on file and death records. If you see a page that says "photo will be here", be patient. Some photos need to be retaken and we are trying to get that done.

Thanks to Marian and Amy for the many hours they have spent on this project; they not only photographed (and often re-photographed) the stones, they kept a spreadsheet with details on each stone - whether or not our earlier information was correct - the condition of stone if it was deteriorating, etc. It may not sound complicated, but believe me, it was.

Carole Palmer
25 June 2002