Hillside Cemetery in Dundee
In 1865 this cemetery was still part of the Clinton Rapalee farm. Clinton and Lucinda Rapalee's young son was buried near the top of the hill in 1862, and a family burying ground was laid out nearby. A larger proprietary cemetery was begun a few years later and many burials from smaller cemeteries in Barrington and Starkey were moved here. In 1908 an association took over management of the ground, and in 1927 the village of Dundee assumed ownership and maintenance of this, the second-largest cemetery in the county.
Hillside cemetery is a very large one, on the north side of NYS Rte. 14A, uphill from the highway west of where it makes a sharp southward turn.
Index to all Dundee cemeteries. The three-letter codes shown in the table are used in the index to denote which burials are in each cemetery. In this index, the name from each gravestone is in regular type; the names of all others are in italics.
There is also a general index to all county burials so far on line.
This is of course still an active cemetery. Sections A through E were read for this list, as was the Rapalee family plot. All sections have recent burials, and the list is only accurate up to the date of reading. No attempt was made to follow up after that time, and no attempt was made to learn whether persons whose names appear on gravestones without dates of death were in fact actually deceased.
Of course the village maintains a list of burials, and these documents were used to enhance this reading, which however is based primarily on the gravestones. No record could be found of burials during the proprietary period, and only a sexton's record apparently exists for the 20-year association period. Since 1928 the village's records appear to be quite good, consisting of a chronilogical sexton's book and an alphabetical listing, plus a scematic map of the lots. The main problem encountered by the compilers is that these recordds do not always conform with one another or with the actual gravestones, though these inconsistencies are almost entirely confined to the older burials prior to the time the village took over administration of the cemetery. In any case, many more names appear on the record than have markers, and this is reflected by the large number of unmarked burials denoted by the symbol # after the name.
Where a person's name appears on the record, the number and owner of the lot is appended to the reading in brackets. This information is intended to help group the names in a rational way and should not be considered a substitute for actual consultation with the village clerk, in whose custody these records are kept.
The map is a general schematic, which will help locate the sections listed here, each of which is larger than most whole rural cemeteries. Sections A and B are the original proprietary cemetery, and the other sections were added later, with most burials in sections C and D taking place while the association maintained the ground. Section E was first used in the 1920s. It should be noted that the Rapalee plot at the top of the cemetery is not in actual fact part of it and is still in the care of the family. The names of persons whose graves are located in this plot are listed, however, just as though they were in a separate section of the larger cemetery.
