Rowland Burials – Where In The World Are We Buried?

Where in the world are our Rowland and Roland ancestors buried? It was a question I had, so I did a little digging to come up with an answer. The FindAGrave website is home to the largest collection of burial information that I know of, which made it a great place to look for relevant data. On a worldwide basis, FindAGrave currently contains 93,134 memorials for people with the surname Rowland, Roland, and other spelling variations.

Not surprisingly, the United States has the lion’s share of the cataloged Rowland/Roland burials with 75,065 — more than 80%. However, FindAGrave is a U.S.-based company, so these results are skewed toward the U.S. as other countries are lagging in discovering the website and creating memorials. Still, it is probably the best snapshot we can provide at this time.

Other countries making up the top-5 are England, Australia, Canada, and Wales. Within the U.S. results, I dug a little deeper and broke out the counts for each state. The Rowland burial quantities for states turned out to be somewhat surprising with Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Georgia taking the top three spots.

FindAGrave provides various search options in addition to locale and surname. I selected the “include maiden name” and “include similar spellings” options and then searched using the “Rowland” and “Roland” spellings. Experimenting with a small dataset provided confidence that these two spellings would include the vast majority of all variants while minimizing overlap. The results shown below are in two separate tables — one for countries, and one for the 50 states (plus Washington D.C.) of the United States.

Rowland Burials by Country

The country data includes the top-20 countries sorted by the rank of the combined quantity.

Rowland Burials by State

The state-level data is sorted alphabetically and includes the state’s rank based on the combined Rowland/Roland quantity column.

The FindAGrave database also includes cenotaphs, memorials for individuals that were cremated, and for those buried in unknown locations. More than two-thirds of the Rowland/Roland memorials include a photo of the headstone. The Rowland Cemeteries page identifies about 130 graveyards that carry the Rowland (and variants) name in reference to a surname or location. Another popular graveyard database is BillionGraves. It includes GPS data and requires all entries to have a photo, although it contains much fewer entries.