As of December 31, 2023 our database lists 4195 entries for those who are buried here and 43 more with monuments who are buried or scattered elsewhere. Of the total number of burials are 193 with unmarked graves. At best these are approximate totals due to errors of omission and commission. In the early years burials and relocations did not always get written down or became unreadable over time. Some of the records in the electronic database came from old funeral home logs and local obituary details, which themselves could be misleading if the burial got relocated afterwards.

Computerizing records began in the 1980s by transcribing handwritten records and headstone inscriptions. Misspellings, abbreviations, and nicknames were common. Wives were often listed by their husband's name, e.g. Mrs. John Doe, and their gravestone may be for an earlier married name than the one at death. Different names for the same person probably led to duplicate entries when a record was thought to be missing. A burial, especially those with no gravestone, can be missing from the record if it wasn't written down or was written but became unreadable. Multiple unmarked graves of unnamed infants in a family plot may have been conflated as the same child if they were not carefully recorded.

Albert P. Dancer, the 20 year old son of Rosalia and David Dancer, who died of typhoid fever November 28, 1881, was the first to be buried on land that later became Rose Hill Cemetery. Cemetery trustees purchased that land from the Dancers in 1885 and Rosalia was one of the trustees. It is believed that she gave Rose Hill its name which is recorded on the 1885 deed. Albert's gravesite is the tallest of several tree trunk monuments in Section 2, five rows west of the main crossroad. Headstones with earlier dates of death were for those who were initially buried elsewhere and moved to Rose Hill later. In the early 1900s there were a number of such moves from Sweet Home Cemetery, exactly 2 miles south of Rose Hill.

John Godfrey, a Civil War Navy Captain, who died and was buried in 1894. His monument is near Albert Dancer's, another tree trunk monument. It is three rows west of the main crossroad.

In 2023 there were 203 flags and 423 crosses.
In 2022 there were 196 flags and 388 crosses.
In 2021 there were 208 flags and 361 crosses.
In 2020 there were 203 flags and 283 crosses.
In 2019 there were 215 flags and 243 crosses.
In 2018 there were 206 flags and 278 crosses.
The numbers change as flags and crosses get added or damaged, but it has grown from the first year, in 1978, when there were only 12 veteran flags, 6 on each side of the main entry road. There were almost 100 flags by 1990.

The Lamoni Lion's Club is in charge of this. They purchase a 5'x8' U.S. flag for a donation that covers its cost (currently $50) to honor a veteran. Alternatively, a family can donate the flag that was given by the military. But those flag will be taken out of service once they are worn beyond repair. When the Lamoni Lion's Club and the VFW started this Memorial Day tradition all of the flags were the military flags that the family turned over to the VFW. Most all of them now are purchased ones.

Gary and Shelly Waugh do this as a labor of love to honor Lamoni veterans. Shelly keeps a list of veterans with flags and crosses and Gary makes the crosses. The Waugh family and others place the crosses in the ground alongside the flags that the Lion's Club put up. Shelly has done research on veterans and collaborates with Rose Hill to share information. Besides war and branch of service, Shelly also records where the veteran is buried if not at Rose Hill and special distinctions like rank, Silver Star, Purple Heart, KIA, or POW.

Contact us at LamoniRoseHill@gmail.com with the following: veteran name, branch, wars, rank, distinctives (KIA, POW, Purple Heart), your relationship and contact info, and where the veteran is buried if not here. We will updates our records and pass it on to the Waughs who make the crosses and to the Lions Club if a flag is desired. The number of flags raised is limited to the number of cement encased pole holders installed at the cemetery and flagpoles to go in them. The Lions Club asks for a donation of $50 to cover the cost of a flag for a Lamoni veteran buried here or at a veteran cemetery. Make check to Lamoni Lions Club with Veteran Flag and their name in the memo. At present, the Waugh family makes crosses without asking for a donation. There are and always will be many more crosses than flags.

Starting in 2023, the crosses were organized in groups by war service starting at the west and meandering to the east side in order from War of 1812, Spanish American, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and vets without war service. Multi-war crosses were installed at the main entrance.

Volunteers set all the flags up in just a few hours, so they are not ordered in any way, so finding a particular one is difficult. One must read the writing on the hem of the flag, high up on the pole which may be faded, flapping in the breeze, or require looking into the sun. Furthermore, flags flying today are not the original ones given by the military to the family. Those flags had to be replaced after decades of wear when they got damaged beyond repair. Some families kept the original and made a donation to have a flag purchased. The government issued flags had easier to read large block letters that were oriented in a standard way. The purchased flags had volunteers do the lettering, sometimes oriented differently or with smaller lettering to accommodate the full name given by the family rather than as would have been written by the military.

This practice was discontinued years ago as the number of flags and crosses grew. There are many more crosses than flags. There will be a cross that corresponds with every flag, but not vice versa.

Rose Hill Cemetery was established by the leaders of the City of Lamoni in October of 1885, when Lamoni was being incorporated. It is a wholly owned affiliate of the Lamoni congregation of the Community of Christ and operated by a board trustees. It has never received funding from the church and has always operated as the Lamoni cemetery, without special privileges for church members. At the beginning of the 1900s, when it was clear that funding was needed to run the cemetery, there was a move to transfer it to the city by the trustees (who were also city leaders). However, state law changed which allowed cities and counties to have cemetery taxes go to private cemeteries in lieu of operating their own so Rose Hill continued with its current structure to this day. Every since 1906 the city has provided financial or other support for running the cemetery.

Annual operations are about $27K a year, or $32K if we had a paid sexton (currently a volunteer). Expenses include mowing, trimming, road gravel, grounds care, insurance, and communications (e.g. postage, signage, brochures, website). Special projects are added when we have surplus funds, grants, and donations to cover them. Volunteers help us keep costs down. Besides a volunteer sexton other volunteers have helped pick up debris and do pruning.

The City of Lamoni provides about 1/3 of operational expenses as a subsidy for services rendered to its citizens. Another 1/3 is covered by earnings from the cemetery endowment fund, but that was less during the pandemic when the market was depressed. The rest must be covered by farmland rental of future expansion property, burial income, lot sale income, and donations. Only half of the lot sale income is available to us since the other half must go into the endowment fund. We retain $250 of the open/close fee for each burial or receive $250 for a cenotaph (monument to someone whose remains are elsewhere). We charge $525 per burial space, half to be deposited in the endowment fund. We expect 15-20 burials (or cenotaphs) per year and 10-15 spaces sold per year. We receive about $400 in the donation jar at the information canopy over Memorial Day weekend. We also receive generous donations by check in memory of loved ones and by friends of Rose Hill Cemetery.

They are not directly connected. We draw from each other in order to provide more accurate information. The burial data on our site will be more current and searchable than what IAGenWeb.org has online for our cemetery.

Many reasons! Women are often buried by a first husband with her former name on the headstone, which differs from her last name on a death certificate. Some widowed daughters were buried on their parents' plot under the family name rather than her married name. Headstones installed years later by descendants may get dates and names wrong, such as a nickname for a first name, whereas genealogy researchers uncover vital records with more correct data on their websites. Newspapers may get details wrong, have typos, or misspell names. Obituaries can have mistakes, especially for the second parent who dies because children who write the obituaries are less aware of dates and places than the spouse was. Ancestry.com and FindAGrave.com are crowd-sourced, so volunteers fill in the details and sometimes they introduce errors based on faulty assumptions. For example, "Infant P.A. Rew" written in a burial log doesn't say whether it is the infant child of P.A. Rew or an infant named P.A. Rew (who might incidentally be the child of P.A. Rew Sr). A wrong assumption could lead to errors about the number of Rew children and their names.

We believe that the LamoniRoseHill.org website is the most accurate source of information. Ironically, some errors on other websites may have come from us when we first converted our handwritten records onto computer files. The written records were sometimes hard to read and full of abbreviated or misspelled names. As websites were emerging in the 1990s that tried to consolidate data on gravestones and family trees, our electronic files were made available. But they were incomplete and not fully vetted and some of that is still out on the Internet. We have made lots of corrections to our database and our website is based on what we have now. We are still making corrections. For example, we keep finding DODs that were the date the obituary was published in the paper rather than the actual DOD.