Two features come into view as you enter the cemetery. The first is the mortuary chapel, circular in design and about sixteen feet in diameter.  The roof, possibly intended to be a dome, was never completed. The mortuary chapel would be used when there was a death in a family which didn't live near the mission.  The body would be brought to the mortuary the evening before burial.  The family would watch by the body during the night, burning candles and praying.  In the morning, the body would be taken into the church for the services and then buried in the cemetery.  If the family lived nearby, the final watch would be held in their house.  These chapel walls have heard the echoes of many funeral Masses and rosaries.  The Soto marker identifies several graves belonging to members of a family who lived at Tumacácori at the turn of the century.

The marked graves in the cemetery are from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Any evidence of mission-era graves was destroyed long ago by weather, treasure hunters, and cattle.  Toward the end of the nineteenth century the cemetery was used as a corral during cattle drives and roundups. Families who moved into the area around 1900 knew it was holy ground, campo santo, and used it once again to bury their dead.  Juanita Alegria's grave is the last burial (1916) and the only one which has been identified.

However, the mission era dead are also here.  Between 1746 and 1825, 637 burials were recorded.  Forty-two burials were registered by Father Ramon Liberós between 1822 and 1825 in the "new cemetery."  Maria Teresa Gonzalez, a Pima child "some five years of age," was the first.  Perhaps she was a victim of one of the terrible epidemics of smallpox or measles that swept through the missions.  Some were killed during Apache raids.  Records from 1826 to 1848 when Tumacácori was abandoned have never been found.