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.

Where to arrange to have your ancestors buried

One of my 32 great-great-great grandparents (my mother's father's father's mother's father, ~1771-1822) turns out to have been buried in Mound View Cemetery, which overlooks the town of Mount Vernon, county seat of Knox County, Ohio. I recommend that you arrange to have yours buried there too, if possible. Let me count the ways:

* Twenty-five years ago the local chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society completed readings of all the county cemeteries, including checks against the burial records (which picked up one of my relatives, the last of her line -- evidently nobody was left to add her name to the stone).

* The resulting two-volume cemetery compilation includes maps at two (sometimes three) different scales including lot numbers and owners' names.

* The cemetery roads themselves have the section numbers painted on them, so it is possible to find a given grave marker without hiking for miles.

Another excellent place to be buried, for similar reasons, is Erie, Pennsylvania. What's your favorite?

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.

Wisconsin leapfrogs into the 21st century

I hope someone more cosmopolitan can correct me, but isn't Wisconsin the first state genealogy society to put its flagship publication on line? The move was dictated by finances but it's also a visual upgrade, and it coincides with a push to publish readable articles in addition to compiled and abstracted records. It's a combined January-April 2009 issue, 52 pages in PDF format available to members. Join at Wisconsin State Genealogical Society. Included in this quarter's contents:

"Dane County -- Inventory from the Lower and Upper McFarland Cemetery"

"Fond du Lac County -- Rienzi Cemetery Study: A Search for Unmarked Graves," by new co-editor Tracy Reinhardt. Another precedent question: who else, where else, has tried to study how many unmarked burials a particular cemetery contains?

"Fond du Lac County -- FDL Public Library Seefeld Local History Room"

"Marquette County -- Thomas Mozley Writes from the Wisconsin Frontier: 'If I am spared I shall see for myself,'" by Harold Henderson (that's me)

"Wood County -- Governor Awards Marshfield Public Library for Genealogy Database"

Tombstone Thursday in Lenawee County, Michigan

The Crazy Cemetery Ladies of Lenawee County have posted readings of at least some cemeteries in five townships of this SE Michigan county: Adrian, Fairfield, Madison, Ogden, and Palmyra. Be sure to check all the tabs on each page; despite the unorthodox web design a lot of real-world work has gone into this.

Fair warning: Not all pages have all links to the others, and the promising-looking links to Fairfield morticians and to their "dump" page don't work for me. But if you live half the country away and have people buried in one of these cemeteries, you won't mind.

Indiana conference and databases

Members of the Indiana Genealogical Society have a conference Saturday in Indianapolis, featuring military records and Pamela K. Boyer. The stay-at-homes have four new members-only databases on the website to explore, three of them offering leads to military records (these are not images of the records themselves and should not be cited as such):

Revolutionary War Veterans Living in Indiana Who Received Pensions (1835)

Students of Earlham College, Richmond (1859)

Roster of 79th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War (1861-1865)

Public Service Company of Indiana Employees Serving in World War II (1944), list from the Danville Republican newspaper

Three cemetery indexes from Noble and Wabash counties are newly available to all visitors.

The ultimate online resource for Kalamazoo

There's a good meeting scheduled for Kalamazoo nine days from now, but if you just can't make it, don't despair -- there's an excellent online site for that county, combining indexes and digital images of original records. You're going to wish your ancestors camped there in 1830 and never left.

Let me count the goodies at the bare-bones site kalamazoogenealogy.org:

vital records indexes and images (page by page in the original books), with a link to local library information;

cemetery transcriptions and (some) images;

"family trees";

directories (for the city, nine between 1860 and 1915), transcriptions and images;

school yearbooks 1859-1976, transcriptions and images;

WWI veterans;

Schoolcraft Express obituaries 1917-1972 with a link to the Kalamazoo Library database; and

probate 1831-1857.

I found useful information about my only relative in the county, a peripatetic stonecutter, and his wife and children. Those of you with more relations here will have a blast.

Illinois Ancestors Tombstone Project

New on Cyndi's List is the Illinois Ancestors Tombstone Project, a beautiful and well-organized collection (as of the last update 14 April) 16,100 tombstone photos in well over 400 cemeteries in 51 of Illinois' 102 counties. According to the site, "As a way of preserving this history, we're taking photos of as many tombstones in Illinois as we can." It's logically structured: the top layer is counties in alphabetical order; within each county, cemeteries are in alphabetical order by name (not location!); and within each cemetery, photos are in alphabetical order by surname, preceded by any introductory pictures or maps. Each item in each layer is represented by a photograph that doubles as a link.

Genealogically minded photographers, or photographically minded genealogists, can contact the webmaster and arrange to automatically upload their pictures. The photos also constitute a database: listings can be searched by surname.The project's central Illinois roots are clear -- Fulton, Peoria, and Tazewell are the most viewed counties, whereas Chicago and the collar counties are missing altogether. There's plenty of room to grow.

The Cemetery Detective

Shirley Wolf has rediscovered 10 African-American cemeteries in southern Indiana's Floyd County, and she may be on to 10 more, according to a long feature story by Katya Cengel in the Sunday Courier-Journal newspaper published across the river in Louisville. The story, perhaps inevitably, leads with Wolf's controversial use of dowsing to find burials, but farther down we get a taste of her genealogical technique:

To locate the unmarked cemeteries, she went through the county's death records, from the early 1900s to the 1960s. When she found an unfamiliar burial site, she would check if the person was African American, and if he or she was, Wolf would check to see if the person owned land. If he or she did, Wolf would visit the property to see what she could find, asking those in the area if anyone knew about a cemetery. ... A picture framer of German, French and Swiss descent [and a past president of the Southern Indiana Genealogical Society], Wolf is focusing on African-American cemeteries because she wants people to know that, despite the ravages of slavery, "there are things that can be found."