Forever and ever without any stories concering small, private or "backyard" burials, and today there are two of them. A widow in southern Indiana has buried her husband in the backyard of the home they lived in for 50 years, working her way around a state law requiring all bodies to be bured in cemeteries:
County officials decided in July to take title for a 20-by-22-foot piece of the Blakers' property, making the county responsible for maintaining it forever as a cemetery. That avoids the state law that requires $100,000 funds be set up to care for any cemetery on private land.
And here's one about the thousands of small cemeteries that dot the Indiana landscape, often the last remnants of a family farm long ago sold off and subdivided:
Some have suffered from neglect or worse, but in other cases, concerned neighbors feel an obligation to them and act as stewards.
[. . .]
Vandals have plagued small, unguarded cemeteries for decades...
Some might find the idea of keeping the bodies so close to home a little creepy, but where I grew up it was common enough to be an accepted part of the landscape. There is a small private cemetery close to where my parents grew up across the road from each other in rural Kentucky full of Morrises and Campbells. There's a different feeling walking through such a place than there is through one of the big modern sites like we have here. More of a connected-to-the-past feeling, if that doesn't sound too mawkish.
