Cemeteries of Little Falls and Morrison County

The Little Falls Catholic cemeteries

Most of Little Falls' historic graves are Catholic, a reflection of who settled the town. The Little Falls Catholic community maintains three cemeteries: Calvary Cemetery, on 13th Avenue NE, along with Holy Family Cemetery and St. Mary's Cemetery. They correspond to the parishes covered in Churches of Little Falls and Morrison County, and together they hold generations of the German and Polish families who built the place.

The parish cemeteries of the county

Out in the small towns, the cemetery usually sits beside the church that founded it. St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery in Pierz is among the largest, with well over 2,500 recorded burials, and the Polish parishes at Bowlus and Sobieski keep St. Stanislaus grounds of their own. The county's Catholic burial history runs deep: a mission was recorded near Belle Prairie as early as 1838, more than a decade before Father Francis Xavier Pierz arrived to recruit the settlers whose descendants fill these cemeteries.

Researching a Morrison County burial

The county is unusually well documented for genealogy. The Morrison County Historical Society keeps a comprehensive list of cemeteries by township and municipality, and its Documenting Morrison County Deaths Project has mapped and indexed many of them; the society's museum sits at 2151 South Lindbergh Drive in Little Falls. Online, most county burials are searchable on Find A Grave and BillionGraves, which carry photographs and headstone transcriptions. For living-parish records, contact the parishes directly through the Little Falls Catholic community or the Haven of Mercy group.

Anyone tracing central-Minnesota roots will find the churches and the cemeteries tell one continuous story. Start with the county's churches or the history of Little Falls.