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The
cemetery is currently owned and maintained by the Fishburn United
Methodist Church Cemetery Association. Information about the burials
in this cemetery was updated and significantly expanded in 1999
by volunteers of the Derry Township Historical Society. Burials
in this cemetery have been printed and a very limited list has
been available on the Internet for some time but such previous
listings have been replaced with this more comprehensive listing.
The current listing contains about 1,090 records. The cemetery
is located at the intersection of Fishburn and Church Roads.

The
cemetery dates from approximately 1845. In the beginning, the name
appears to have been the Fishburn Meeting House Cemetery . An old
manuscript, which detailed death and burial records of about 220
individuals, was found in the church archives, and made it
possible to identify many previously unrecorded stones by use of
partially unweathered information and the search capabilities of
the computer database.
The
old manuscript was a log kept by the Fishburn brothers, Philip,
Peter, and John, dating from 1845 through 1894. Use of this old
manuscript verified the names and dates of about 100 individuals
already documented in other lists of this cemetery and allowed
new entries for 141 individuals for whom no cemetery data was
previously available. The oldest graves are in the rows closest
to the church.
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Benjamin Fishburn
and his wife Sophia Snavely sold 25 square perches out of their
farm on December 28, 1846 for $29.50 to Frederick Blessing,
Charles Dasher, and Jonas Miller, trustees of the Church of the
United Brethren for a "house of worship and a burial
place." In 1946, the denomination merged with the
Evangelical Church to become the" Evangelical United
Brethren Church." In 1968 the denomination entered into
another merger with the Methodist Church and thus became the
"Fishburn United Methodist Church."
The Fishburn Cemetery has been recorded a number
of times. The listing supplied here is a compilation of all known
previous recordings including a listing posted on the Internet
under the title Fishburn Meeting House as recorded and published
by William Henry Egle in 1896 and a listing compiled by the Capital
Area Genealogical Society and published in their quarterly publication,
Keystone Seekers, Spring 1997, p.15. This listing
was finalized in 2001 but fieldwork concluded in 2000.
The
historic fence that guarded the Fishburn Road side of the cemetery
was removed in 2003 due to the damage from snowplows and the expense
required to repair the fence. It is not known why the cemetery
is not documented on the Derry Township map published in the Dauphin
County Historical Atlas of 1875. It should appear just west
of the church.
We would be happy to conduct a cemetery search or do more extensive research for you. The cemetery search would include all
Derry Township cemeteries plus others that are closely associated with our township. Most of the names in our cemetery database are not available elsewhere on the Internet. The cost is $5 per surname and you may supply up to three alternate spellings (total of four).
If you find your ancestors in
the list below and require additional information, please
contact us
.
For more thorough research, please request a copy of our research policy. In addition, our
obituary list and our name index of “lost and found” ancestors may be of interest to you. Please check our main
library page for these and other links, as we continue to update our information on line.
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