The Caswell Family Cemetery sits adjacent to the Governor Richard Caswell Memorial in Kinston, North Carolina. The half-acre of land was provided by Richard Caswell and designated as a burial ground in his 1787 will, where he states that it (as well as another half-acre plot) may be used “for all those of my family and Connections who may choose to bury their Relations and friends there.” Within the cemetery are several generations of Caswell family members, some of which have marked burials and others who are documented on paper only, with no markers for the graves themselves. This page contains a list of those who are buried within the cemetery, as well as those who are suspected to have been buried there. 

Whether Richard Caswell is actually buried in the Caswell Family Cemetery has been debated. Relatives of Caswell made mention of his burial at the site of the present markers, as did Civil War-era maps and documents. However, some scholars are skeptical of the claims, contending that period newspapers documenting Caswell's funeral in Fayetteville never mentioned a burial in Fayetteville or the fact that Caswell was brought to Kinston for burial. His immediate family has always claimed that he is buried in the cemetery, particularly his only surviving son, Dallam, and his only surviving daughter, Susan Gatlin. Dr. Charles Ewen, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at East Carolina University, believes that his 2008 archaeological excavation of the memorial site has confirmed that Caswell is indeed buried at the Caswell Family Cemetery. 

The quest for Caswell's gravesite unearthed yet another burial mystery. After local businessman Ted Stampley issued a $1,000 reward for the discovery of Caswell's final resting place in 1999, a local resident came forward with information on a tunnel and skeleton she found by Herritage Street after a hurricane blew over an oak tree. Caswell's parents were supposedly buried in that general area—then known as The Hill—where the Bentley Bed and Breakfast now stands. The original dwelling of “The Hill” met its demise in a fire during the late 1800s. In the ensuing investigation, Dr. Charles Ewen and Susan Burgess Hoffman uncovered two brick crypts with two windowed caskets of a mid-Nineteenth-century design, firmly dating them well after Caswell's death. After the discovery, Dr. Ewen tenaciously hoped that the unmarked grave was that of yet another missing Caswell pair—Lewis and Nancy Caswell. Dr. Ewen and Hoffman sent the caskets to the Smithsonian Institute for physical anthropologist Doug Owsley to analyze, and both remains proved to be female. The pair were also determined to have been Washingtons rather than Caswells. This discovery gained historians valuable information about the town's history, yet the mystery of where Lewis and Nancy Caswell are buried still persists.

Below is a list of people who are either buried in the Caswell Family Cemetery or who are strongly suspected to have been because of their familial ties to Caswell. The majority of information in this chart has been pulled directly from the headstone inscriptions, with any information not provided on the headstone being supplemented with data from the List of Known Persons Buried in Caswell Cemetery, the Red House cemetery research files, the Dallam Caswell Bible, Ancestry, FamilySearch, and from Sheri L. Balko's dissertation "Richard Caswell, Lost Governor: Memory in Historical Archaeology" (pages 183-189). 

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