The Political Graveyard

The Political Graveyard
Type of site	Political
Available in	English
Owner	Lawrence Kestenbaum
URL	politicalgraveyard.com
Launched	1996

The Political Graveyard is a website and database that catalogues information on more than 277,000 American political figures and political families, along with other information. The name comes from the website's inclusion of burial locations of the deceased (when known). It is also a pun; where bodies are buried can refer to the politicians accused of crimes or touched by scandal.

History

The site was created in 1996 by Lawrence Kestenbaum,^[1]^[2]^[3] then an academic specialist at Michigan State University, and later on staff at the University of Michigan.

Kestenbaum was formerly a county commissioner, and in 2004 was elected to be

Creative Commons License

.

Over the years, the definition of "eligible political figure" has been expanded. It now includes most high federal officials,

U.S. presidential nominating conventions

of the major political parties.

The database attempts to capture very basic biographical and office-holding data for its political figures. Besides where they are buried, cause of death is broken down into dozens of categories.

Politicians are listed alphabetically, by office held or sought, and by dates and locations of birth, residence, and death. The names are sorted and indexed by surname, birthplace, positions held, demography, geography, religion, occupation, cause of death, and final resting place.

Some are listed in categories, including occupations, ethnicity, religious and organizational affiliation, honors, and awards. "For example, 18 politicians were born into slavery; six have been in space; 69 survived assassination attempts; and 908 were in trouble or disgraced."^[2] An exhaustive cataloging of transgressions are listed by the nature of the accusation,^[1] as well as by decade and by state.

It reports their relation (at least by blood and marriage) with other politicians listed, their

political families. Individuals listed on the site are linked together if their relationship meets the Rule of 1/1000 common ancestry. Each cluster of three or more linked politicians is treated as a family, with family name and location assigned by an algorithm; the largest individual family cluster is the Kennedys

, with 34 members. The site's largest cluster, with 2,134 members, is called "Four Thousand Related Politicians", most of the larger families are subsets of this group, with each subset defined and named by an algorithm. The largest subset family is the Huntington-Chapin-Waterman family of Connecticut, with 229 members.

References

^ ^a ^b Leibovich, Mark (October 1, 2006). "Hitting a Self-Destruct Button". New York Times. Retrieved June 12, 2018. 'You always seem to have politicians doing bizarrely self-destructive things, especially involving sex,' says Lawrence Kestenbaum, creator of 'Political Graveyard,' a history Web site that includes an exhaustive cataloging of transgressions by politicians.
^
The News Gazette
.
^ ^a ^b Hagadone, Zach (November 2, 2016). "The Political Graveyard". Boise Weekly. p. 30. Retrieved December 23, 2020. If you're sick to death of politics, take a stroll through The Political Graveyard (politicalgraveyard.com), which logs where more than 200,000 U.S. politicians are buried.

External links

Media related to The Political Graveyard at Wikimedia Commons

[NYT_2006-1] Leibovich, Mark (October 1, 2006). "Hitting a Self-Destruct Button". New York Times. Retrieved June 12, 2018. 'You always seem to have politicians doing bizarrely self-destructive things, especially involving sex,' says Lawrence Kestenbaum, creator of 'Political Graveyard,' a history Web site that includes an exhaustive cataloging of transgressions by politicians.

[NG_2016-2] 
The News Gazette
.

[BW_2016-3] Hagadone, Zach (November 2, 2016). "The Political Graveyard". Boise Weekly. p. 30. Retrieved December 23, 2020. If you're sick to death of politics, take a stroll through The Political Graveyard (politicalgraveyard.com), which logs where more than 200,000 U.S. politicians are buried.

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