Welcome to the Fehmarn Cemeteries

This page is where you can find the headstones of your ancestral names.  All 6 cemeteries on the Island of Fehmarn and the 2 smaller cemeteries located in nearby town of Großenbrode are represented on this page. The cemeteries are located at the St. Nikolai church in Burg, The Kepelle Cemetery on Sahrendorfer Str., at the St. Johannis Church in Bannesdorf, at the St. Petri Church in Landkirchen, at the St. Johannis Church in Petersdorf, and two small cemeteries in Großenbrode.

To be buried in one of the eight cemeteries, which are all owned by the churches, does not guarantee you an eternal resting place. In the Church cemeteries, family members are buried for only 25 years, after which time your family must pay the church and maintain the gravesite to remain in the cemetery. Thus on Fehmarn, old gravesites are not very common. Most sites are of those who died in the last 25 years.  Occasionally, one large headstone is used for several individuals in a family.  It appears when this is the case; the 25 year rule starts over each time another family member is buried.  (I have been told that those exhumed are put in a bone barn.  Truth or myth, I don’t know for sure.).  Many of the headstones pictured here are no longer in the listed cemetery, but will remain on this site.

I have photographed over 3800 of the headstones on Fehmarn, Großenbrode and Heiligenhafen and they are available for your viewing on this site.

Family members maintain the individual plots of each gravesite.  They visit often and work hard at making beautiful gardens of flowers for their loved ones.  This special care by the families makes the cemeteries a beautiful and peaceful place to visit. 

If you are in possession of photographs of a headstone of a family member from Fehmarn or Fehmaraner's buried elsewhere please consider sending a copy of them for placement on this web site. Many of the pictures you have may be the only record remaining of those gravesites on Fehmarn.

Click here to search the cemeteries

 Forgotten and Forsaken
By E. Bügge-Wood

‘Tween hawthorn and ‘tween savory
There lies a marker, - halve in view
In weedy meadow stands the stone.
A desolated field, - so all alone, -
Forgotten and forsaken

You yank the weeds away and then….
You read eighteen-and hundred-one.
And further down, dried out as bone,
You see two names upon the stone, -
Forgotten and forsaken.

They were two people, man and wife,
Were young, so strong and full of life.
What they have seen, what they have done
Is in the past and long, long gone. –
Forgotten and forsaken.

AT THE GRAVE-STONE
By: E. Bügge-Wood

The grave, mom’s folks were laid to rest,
Red granite stone, here’s what it read:
“Sorrow and Strife was your life”
The words so sad made me depressed!----
Together, they were buried. -

    Never will they be at our side. -
There, at their grave, how I have cried.-
From the cradle to that cold, cold stone,
They had to go - so all alone!

In Burg, “God’s acre”, laid to rest,
Burg, Fehmarn - where they lived.
The granite stone is long replaced, -
The marker,- disappeared? -
The words and what it read, - erased?

Never will they be at our side. -
There, at their grave, how I have cried.
From the cradle to that cold, cold stone,
They had to go so all alone!