Who owns the grave spot in a cemetery,,,, If the cemetery is sold for development what happens to the buried?

Question

Who has ownership of a grave spot where a loved one is buried?
If all the spots in a cemetery is taken does the property still belong to the original owner?

Answer 1

deeds only mean you own the right to bury there, not that you own the actual land. Cemeteries cannot be sold for development without a re-location plan and the consent of the lot owners EXCEPT in the case of eminent domain, which the government can invoke to force the re-location.

Answer 2

A cemetary where human remains are laid to rest are covered under Government guidelines for sanitary needs. If a piece of property is listed as a cemetary with burial remians upon it.....it must meet federal consecration guidelines and that can be terribly difficult to do at times, depending.

land is land and who ever went through escrow with the miles of paperwork, owns the land. Usually that land ownership deed belongs to a church or a funeral home and in some cases a company devoted to mortuary needs that include the burial of the body.

The individual plots are like buying a condo in a residential building maintained by a homeowners group. A person can spend upwards of 2000 or 4000 dollars on a plot to be buried within at someone else's cemetary. The plot is bought for the client in care of the family and maintained by the landowner, however they see fit. This usually consists of a cemetary caretaker who cuts the grass, deweeds the public areas and reports, repairs, or installs the land and it's modifications.

For your question. The plots maybe be sold to seperate families, but the land is owned by a person, company or corporation. If that business decided to change the land from a cemetary to a housing district, there are miles of paperwork and money that will be overseen by a government agency of some sort. It doesn't happen often, but has happened in the past.

If this should happen the city, town or community has a right to move the contents of the land to another location, but the families of the deceased also have a right to reimbursement or proper care of their family deceased.

Answer 3

The lot owner will have a deed, they own it, not the developer, and lot owners can sue if they don't like what the managers are doing, and usually they have a state cemetery board. There should be a register of lot owners, saying who has/had the deed for the lot.

Answer 4

well, you would think that the people who would want to build a development would have to go to court to move all the graves to a different site.

Way to much work and expense for a normal developer.

Answer 5

All dead persons in the cemetery will come back to life and hunt the living.