The Curious History of New Orleans’ St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

New Orleans’ St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is arguably one of the most famous cemeteries in all of the United States. Known to be the burial site of voodoo queen Marie Laveau and the future grave of Nicholas Cage (yes, really), tourists flock to this burial ground year round. However, don’t consider yourself lucky if you have an ancestor buried in Cemetery No. 1. Here’s why.

If you’re a genealogist looking to fulfill some FindAGrave requests in New Orleans, you’ll notice something curious about St Louis Cemetery No. 1: it has over 100 requests. Similarly, its sister cemetery, Cemetery No. 2, has over 120 requests. This is atypical. An average cemetery usually has anywhere from 1 to 40 photo requests on FindAGrave; the most I've seen personally is at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C., with 90 open requests. This vast number of photo requests becomes even more curious when you compare it to the physical size of these cemeteries. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 takes up only one small city block in New Orleans, and No. 2 is a little larger, spanning three blocks.

The second curious thing you'll notice is that despite these tiny sizes, these cemeteries host an astonishing number of graves. Cemetery No. 1 hosts a whopping 3,082 memorials, according to FindAGrave. And Cemetery No. 2? A (frankly unbelievable) 6,463 memorials.

Read that again.

Six thousand, four hundred, and sixty three graves. In 3 city blocks.

That math doesn't add up, right?

The answer to these curiously high numbers of memorials and unfulfilled photo requests lies in the manner in which bodies are buried: there are so many unfulfilled requests because there is nothing to photograph.

The mausoleums that you'll see in these cemeteries host not one body, but many. A tomb would typically be passed down through the family for decades, if not a century or more; but what differs between these tombs and more modern mausoleums that you may see at your local, spacious cemetery is that the remains, well...don't remain.

After exactly 1 year and 1 day (a time frame that apparently originated with Spanish settlers), the tomb will be reopened, the casket will be removed for reuse, and the bones will be covered in a sheet and pushed to the back of the tomb where they will fall into a hole. Some mausoleums in these cemeteries housed communal underground crypts, where bones from multiple tombs would fall into one large mass grave. In others, only bones from one family's tomb would fall.

The walls surrounding St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 also house vertical tombs, being about 10 feet from front to back. To push the bones to the back of the tomb, an individual would need a broom with a pole long enough to span the length of the tomb, supposedly from which the expression "I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole” is rumored to have originated.

Thus is the reason why you may consider yourself unlucky, rather than lucky, to have an ancestor buried in a New Orleans cemetery. While the area is certainly rich with history, finding a death certificate or obituary naming one of these cemeteries as your ancestor's final resting place will likely mean that you won't find their name etched on a gravestone. While some families etched every name of the deceased into stone, other tombs may only have the family name. And since St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 dates back to 1789, it is entirely possible that you won't find an inscription at all. Many tombs have been severely damaged or, due to the swampy land below, have sunk underground, never to be seen again.