Welcome to WCCPS
Genealogical Research RequestsPlease let us introduce ourselves to you. We were a genealogical organization that was working for YOU and anyone who has ancestors from Wayne County. The Wayne County Cemetery Preservation Society is now working under the Wayne County Genealogical Society. As our name suggested, one of our main goals is to preserve all the graves and cemeteries of the county, but the reason for our formation and being encompasses much more than “saving cemeteries.”
We have made it our goal to accomplish the following tasks:
- To pinpoint and to record the exact location of every cemetery inside the borders of Wayne County and to make that information available to the public.
- To collect and record to the best of our ability the most accurate information that can be obtained from the inscription on every tombstone in the county that is in danger of weathering away or being destroyed.
- To photograph and archive pictures of all the cemeteries and threatened tombstones in the county, so that a historic record of our ancestors' headstones will be retained for future generations.
- To compile basic genealogical and historic data relating to the persons who are buried in our early cemeteries and of the early churches associated with them.
- Finally, to bring to the attention of the appropriate authorities any persons who would cause or aid in the destruction of any of our historic markers or cemeteries.
This Is A Cemetery….
Lives are commemorated, deaths are recorded, families are reunited, memories are made tangible, and love is undisguised. Communities accord respect, families bestow reverence, historians seek information, and our heritage is thereby enriched. Testimonies of devotion, pride and remembrance are carved into stone to pay warm tribute to accomplishments and to the life, not death, of a loved one.
The cemetery is homeland for family memorials that are a sustaining source of comfort to the living. A cemetery is a history of people, a perpetual record of yesterday, and a sanctuary of peace and quiet today. A cemetery exists because every life is worth remembering – always.
WCCPS is no longer an active organization as such. Although we are still busy reading, recording and researching the tombstone inscriptions in all sixteen Wayne County townships, our numbers are slim. Our job is winding down and we encourage you to contact the Wayne County Public Library in Wooster, Ohio or the Wayne County Genealogical Society for genealogical requests. The Wayne County Ohio GenWeb site has a listing of paid researchers who will assist you with indepth research. WCCPS is dedicating its time toward gathering information in order to be able to present to the public in the near future the most accurate and complete listing of burials within the borders of Wayne County, Ohio. Although we cannot take time to disseminate information, we do welcome incoming information such as the history of a church or cemetery, church or private burial records, word of a lost cemetery or the knowledge of a person’s burial without a tombstone or marker.