Kembang Kuning Surabaya

I take no credit whatsoever for producing these images, nor the very detailed report that accompanies them.  I am grateful to David and John Peters for this information and for choosing me and my research website as a 'home' for their own hard work.

They were keen to offer this information to the public domain without a fee or a subscription. They also wished to retain ownership and recognition, and they approached me to ask if I would be interested in adding their collection of Armenian graves in Surabaya to my collection from Asia. The watermark is deliberate to discourage web-bots from harvesting images and adding them to online 'stock image' sites (which seems to be happening more and more these days). 

If you would like an image for your own personal use, I will be happy to supply one, albiet with a less intrusive watermark, but a watermark there will be so that David and John rightly retain ownership and copyright. Please respect this.

I reproduce below David and John's notes so that readers have context and detail, they wouldn't normally have.

In August 2018 we had a chance to visit Surabaya and look for long lost family graves. This presented a good opportunity to photograph as many of the Armenian graves as possible in order to preserve some of the remaining historical information. 

An initial list of names was made from the church burial records. The records at the cemetery office provided the grave locations and the names of all people sharing each grave. These records contained many misspelt names making it necessary to use spellings from other sources. A small number of extra names was found during searching of the cemetery records and also while searching the cemetery itself.

Several cemetery blocks were visited but the poor condition of the older graves and the increasingly crowded layout did not lend itself to an orderly numerical search.

About 30 graves were found with a plaque intact. A greater number have yet to be found.
It should be possible to find more on a return visit but it is clear that some, perhaps the majority, of unfound graves no longer exist or have no identifiable information.

Possible reasons why a grave may not have been found yet:

No identifiable information or no identifiable neighbouring graves
Time constraints - several of the newer cemetery blocks were not searched
Not enough time spent in some of the blocks that were checked. It’s possible not all subsections were searched.
Some older graves have been buried by rubbish or covered with soil during construction of nearby recent graves.
The heavy concrete roof may have collapsed.
The name was not found in the cemetery records.

Is it anticipated that an updated report will be produced after another visit to Kembang Kuning, hopefully within the next couple of years

Things to do:

Find more graves!
Some grave locations are still to be checked for additional people buried there.
Cross check against LDS microfilm copy of cemetery records when it is digitised.
Finish transcribing the Armenian script.
Produce a nicer report.

The Cemetery

Kembang Kuning cemetery is divided into various blocks, each identified with a single or double letter. In addition to the general burial areas there are dedicated blocks for war graves, Jewish graves and a small area for Japanese graves.

At the time of writing the cemetery records held details of over 65000 burials.

Early graves were usually identified using just the block name and a grave number eg B123

Newer in-fill graves have a letter suffix eg B123A, B123B….B123AA, B123AB

Some blocks are divided into subsections which are designated by a roman numeral eg B II 123.

The grave numbering sequence spans across all subsections.

Subsection identifiers have not been used here except for the index.