NINE FEET UNDER.

The big perk in being able to trace your ancestry to an owner of the New York Marble Cemetery, the city's oldest nonsectarian public burial place, behind the Provenzano-Lanza Funeral Home, off Second Avenue above Second Street (not to be confused with the New York City Marble Cemetery, across Second Avenue, which has monuments aboveground), is that you are eligible for occupancy, though none of the people at a recent owners' meeting looked ready to descend into the vaults on a permanent basis. Inspired by a yellow-fever epidemic, the developer of the cemetery, one Perkins Nichols, in 1830, encased the dead in marble vaults well belowground, so that their germs could not escape. Eroding plaques are set into the "distinctive rubble walls" surrounding the cemetery, and one of the first orders of business at the meeting was how to raise some funds, in these desperate times, to restore the plaques and keep the walls from crumbling and the owners from being sued.

Who are the owners of the New York Marble Cemetery? They tend to be people with Dutch, English, or French surnames--Abeel, Rowlands, DuBois--who have an interest in genealogy and at least one ancestor who was a prominent New Yorker in the eighteen-thirties. Twenty owners showed up for this year's meeting. They wore nametags that identified them by ancestor and vault number. The meeting was run by Peter Van Cowenhoven Luquer (Bailey, Vault 22), of Vermont, who knows refreshingly little about his Bailey ancestors but says that he had a great-great-great-uncle named Payne, who wrote "Home Sweet Home." He was ably assisted by Anne Wright Brown (Wright, Vault 83; Markoe, Vault 110), of Maryland, who knows everything about everyone's ancestors--she has published a catalogue of the original vault owners--and was the force behind cleaning up the cemetery, locating descendants, and shaking them down for donations.

Ms. Brown is the only owner who has actually been in the vaults. When her time comes, she says, she expects to end up in her husband's ...