Interment rights; descendant, etc., allowed to petition circuit court of locality.
SB1055 amends Virginia law governing family cemeteries and interment rights. The bill allows an immediate family member or descendant of a person buried in an identified family cemetery to petition the circuit court for interment rights when the cemetery is located on private property owned by someone else or on public property owned by, or held in trust for, a locality. The petition is limited to cases involving a deceased person who died before July 1, 2024, and the petitioner is treated as being within the existing perimeter of the family cemetery, with that perimeter established by a survey agreed to by the petitioner and property owner.
If the petitioner proves kinship, the court must grant interment rights. The bill defines immediate family member broadly to include spouses, children, parents, siblings, grandchildren, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and it allows proof of kinship through official records or other reliable evidence such as obituaries, family Bibles, letters, photographs, and similar documentation. The court may also require the petitioner to pay the private property owner’s reasonable costs and fees. The bill expressly excludes cemeteries and similar facilities located on church property and preserves a property owner’s ability to seek removal of remains from previously unidentified or abandoned graveyards under existing law.
The bill amends and reenacts Code of Virginia § 57-27.1:1, expanding the statutory process for obtaining interment rights in family cemeteries and explicitly extending it to certain family cemeteries on public property. It affects property owners, localities, and family members seeking burial access, while leaving church-owned burial grounds outside the statute’s reach. It also interacts with existing cemetery and disinterment provisions, including § 57-27.1 and § 57-38.1, and creates a court-supervised mechanism for determining kinship, surveying cemetery boundaries, and allocating costs.
The bill appears to have been broadly supported and noncontroversial in the legislative process. It passed the Senate and House overwhelmingly, with unanimous or near-unanimous committee and floor votes, and the Senate later agreed to House amendments. The vote history suggests general agreement that the measure addresses a narrow property and burial-rights issue without major partisan division.
The main points of potential contention are practical rather than ideological: how to define the perimeter of a family cemetery, who pays for surveying and litigation costs, and what evidence should be sufficient to prove kinship. Property owners may be concerned about compelled access or added burdens on private land, while family members and descendants are the intended beneficiaries of the new petition process. The bill also draws a clear line excluding church property, which likely reflects sensitivity to religious burial grounds and may have helped limit opposition.