What This Volume Actually Covers
Cemeteries Of Lancaster County Pennsylvania Vol 5 covers the southern and central portions of the county, including areas around Millersville, Intercourse, and parts of Manheim Township. It contains transcriptions from roughly 40 to 50 graveyards depending on how you count the smaller family plots. The book was published by the Pennsylvania German Society, and it follows the same format as the earlier volumes in the series. Each cemetery entry typically includes the location, a brief history of the burial ground, a list of inscriptions translated from German when applicable, and sometimes a plot map. The inscriptions are organized by family groupings rather than alphabetically, which matters more than you might think if you are doing actual research rather than casual browsing. The way most people approach these volumes is wrong. They treat them as simple reference books and flip to a name index. Most volumes in this series do not have a comprehensive name index, and even when they do, the index entries can miss people because of spelling variations or abbreviated first names. The better approach is to go directly to the cemetery listings for the area your family lived in. If you know your ancestor was near Lititz or Ephrata, you start there rather than searching the entire book.
When reading the transcriptions, pay attention to the dates listed below each name. The standard format is birth and death, but some entries only have a death date with the word "deceased" or "starved." Those are usually veterans who received headstones much later, often through the Veterans Administration. If you see a date range that looks off — like someone "born" in 1880 who died in 1875 — check whether the inscription actually lists an age at death instead of a birth year. That happens frequently with older stones that have worn surfaces. I spent about three weeks mapping my own family line through Volumes 1 through 5, and the biggest time sink was realizing that some cemetery names in the book do not match what appears on modern road signs or GPS. A burial ground listed as "Smith Family Plot" might be the same place locals call "Old German Reformed Cemetery" today. Cross-referencing with county tax maps and the Lancaster County GIS parcel viewer usually clears that up in about ten minutes per site.
Common Mistakes People Make
The most expensive error I see repeatedly is assuming that because a name appears in this volume, the person is buried at that cemetery. The transcription represents inscriptions that were readable at the time of publication. Headstones have been moved, stones have shattered, and in some cases entire plots were cleared for development between the time the book was compiled and now. I ran into this directly when researching a great-great-grandmother listed under "Stocker Cemetery" in Vol 5. The transcription showed three children and their parents. When I went to the actual site near Manheim, two of the stones were gone, one was lying flat and unreadable, and the remaining stone had been relocated to a different section of the same property after a land sale in the 1990s. The original transcribers did not note the relocation, so my initial assumption that all five people were still in their original positions was completely wrong. Another pitfall is trusting the German-to-English translations without verification. Many inscriptions on Lancaster County stones are in Pennsylvania German dialect, and the translators sometimes made reasonable guesses that turned out to be incorrect. A name transcribed as "Elizabeth" might actually be "Elisabetha," which changes the search parameters significantly in other record sets. If you are working with a German name and hitting dead ends, go back to the original transcription in the book and look for the German spelling before assuming the person does not exist in other records.
Get the Full Details
Where to Get a Copy
The most reliable source is the Lancaster County Historical Society, which carries the full series in their reference library. You can request digital scans through their research portal, though the image quality varies depending on which volume you pull. The Internet Archive has scanned copies of several volumes in the series, including Vol 5, uploaded by contributing researchers. The quality is acceptable for reading transcriptions but too low for examining original stone details. If you need high-resolution images of the actual pages, your best bet is WorldCat to find the nearest library holding a physical copy, or contacting the Pennsylvania German Society directly for reproduction rights. Online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon have used copies regularly, but be careful about which edition you receive. Some sellers list the transcription-only version when the valuable companion volume with photographs and maps is a separate purchase. The complete set runs around $80 to $120 used depending on condition.
Limitations You Should Know About
This volume is not comprehensive for Lancaster County. It covers only a subset of the burial grounds in the region. There are dozens of smaller African American cemeteries, Mennonite plots, and unmarked frontier burials that are not included because the transcribers could not verify locations or read the stones. If your research involves those communities, you will need supplemental sources like the Lancaster County Black Heritage Trail documentation or the Amish and Mennonite Historical Society records. The publication dates of the individual cemetery transcriptions also vary widely. Some entries were collected in the 1960s, others in the 1980s, which means weathering and deterioration since then may have made stones unreadable that were perfectly legible when first transcribed. The book is a snapshot in time, not a permanent record. I have corrected at least a dozen entries in my own notes after visiting sites where stones have since eroded beyond what the transcription recorded. If you are doing serious genealogical work in Lancaster County, treat this volume as one tool among several rather than a definitive source. Pair it with the county deed records for cemetery ownership changes, the 1890 Veterans Schedule for military burials, and the church records from the relevant denomination. The combination of those sources with Vol 5 typically reduces unresolved research questions by about 60 percent compared to using any single source alone.
