We are very excited to announce a new database: Pittsburgh, PA: Gaines Funeral Home Records, 1925-1934. This database contains two volumes of funeral home records. Searchable fields include names of the deceased; dates and locations of birth, death, funeral service and interment, names of parents and spouses. Other information available in the images includes occupation, cemetery, age at death, name of the attending physician, and clergyman. The records begin in 1925 and end in 1934. This project makes 2,186 records and 5,680 names fully searchable.
The Gaines Funeral Home was established by George W. Gaines in 1919 in the historically African-American neighborhood of Homewood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Most people in this database were buried in Monongahela Cemetery in Monongahela or Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Other burials occurred in Greenwood and Homewood Cemeteries in Pittsburgh. Some bodies were transported to further locations for burial including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. While most of the records in this database pertain to the Pittsburgh area, people in this database were born in a variety of locations including Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Maryland, Washington D.C. and more.
The original volumes are kept in the R. Stanton Avery Special Collections at NEHGS, call number Mss 1080.
We are grateful to the many dedicated volunteers who indexed all of the names for this project, including: Sandy Caldwell, Janet Essency, Nancy Johnson, Linda Weaver, Kathleen Oberley, Rich Wood, Linda Mathew, Melanie Nelson, Loretta Aldrich, Donna McClure, David Fredette, Carol Farrington, Renda Smith, Jaimie Williams-Peterson, and Eileen McCarthy. If you would like to become part of the team working on rewarding genealogical projects, please contact Rachel Adams, Database Services Volunteer Coordinator via email at rachel.adams@nehgs.org.
Please note: This database is available to all Individual-level and above NEHGS members only. Consider membership.