You want a desecrated cemetery? I'll show you a desecrated cemetery!

Thanks to Dick Eastman for picking up the ongoing saga of the casual burial and unburial of deceased paupers and mental patients on the northwest side of Chicago in the Dunning neighborhood.

Those looking for more details (and indications that Chicago's standards may have declined over the last 30 years) can find my lengthy article, "Grave Mistake," in the archives of the Chicago Reader, 21 September 1989.  At that time it was a housing development; now it's a school. A lot has happened since then, but you get the idea.

Is your down-and-out Chicago ancestor in this database?

"Forty-four-year-old Adam Huber of 2026 N. Paulina became a 'social cipher' around midnight Saturday, March 17, 1894. According to the Sunday Tribune, the immigrant German carpenter had been beating his wife, Katherine. Then his son George intervened, shooting his father in the chest and killing him instantly.

"Huber's death certificate, prepared the next day by Cook County Coroner James McHale, bears the laconic notation: 'Co. Undertaker. Dunning.' Perhaps because the family was left without resources, Huber was buried at taxpayers' expense in Dunning Cemetery, the county cemetery on the semirural far northwest side of the city.

"There may have been a grave marker--but if there was, it did not last long. Huber's remains vanished into the cemetery, along with those of thousands of other people--the poor, the insane, the tubercular, the stillborn, the vagrants--whose only crime had been to die in Cook County without friends and without money." (Harold Henderson, "Grave Mistake," Chicago Reader 21 September 1989)

Barry A. Fleig is doing what many genealogists dream of -- making sure that no one is forgotten. Over more than 25 years of diligent activity he has collected many records of those buried in the "potter's field" on Chicago's northwest side. Now his work (in an on-line database) and much more information chronicling these forgotten and abandoned burials is on line at Cook County Cemetery at Dunning, Chicago, Illinois. The database contains about 7800 names but Fleig estimates more than 38,000 were buried there over the years beginning in 1854.

UPDATE 21-22 October: Board for the Certification of Genealogists president Jeanne Larzalere Bloom was quoted in the Chicago Tribune story on this subject earlier this afternoon. See http://bcgcertification.org/blog/2014/10/bcg-helps-explain-chicagos-poorest-burials/



Harold Henderson, "Is your down-and-out Chicago ancestor in this database?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 October 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

When the dead gain power

Recently I heard from genealogist/researcher Barry Fleig, who I hadn't talked to in 22 years. Back then he was an indispensable source when I wrote an article about the unanticipated exhumation of people buried in anonymous graves on the former grounds of a Chicago mental health facility in the Dunning neighborhood. (It was a genealogy article, but I was comprehensively ignorant of the subject then.) He had just seen report of a similar situation developing in Lexington, Kentucky, at the Eastern States Hospital. More on that story here. More on the general topic in several February posts at Graveyards of Illinois.

In both cases it's in the interest of powerful individuals, businesses, and bureaucracies to deny the existence of these poorly documented graveyards and the people in them, and to withhold any records that survive. (Some preposterous provisions of HIPAA and even more preposterous misunderstandings of it now make the situation even worse.)

But the people buried in these forgotten places -- usually unsuccessful, unappealing, and unlucky in life -- have a surprising power in death. Living people (the majority without a vested interest) might well have scorned them in life -- but we do not want their remains randomly dug up and tossed about.

One obvious thing that Barry and I both missed at the time is that pretty much every site of an old asylum or mental hospital is also going to be the site of extensive and poorly documented burials from the 1800s and at least the first half of the 1900s.