Grave Disturbance in Early Chicago Cemeteries

It always amazes me what a rich resource we have in the genealogy community-- the people who generously share the information they work so hard to find. I am continually on the lookout for information on my Irish Chicago ancestors. Any records of these people from the nineteenth century are a godsend!

A few years back, I heard about the removal of many of the early Irish interred in the late 1800s in the Old Catholic Cemetery in north Chicago to the new Calvary Cemetery. I can’t remember which part of the genealogy community clued me into this resource. Did I hear this from the Chicago Genealogy group on Facebook or the Cook County message board or from one of my dear genealogy friends and mentors? I’m not sure of the origin of this record description, but I do remember accessing some names of the “removed” and writing them down.

As we often do with research, I put this list away and forgot about it.

 

Recently I have been researching my Carney/Duffy family again and re-discovered this Old Catholic Cemetery Removal list of names.  What a potential goldmine this was. Since recording the names, I have identified more cohort families. I wanted to take a fresh look at the source of this list with the benefit of my additional knowledge. Some questions came to mind:

1. Where exactly was the Old Catholic Cemetery?
2. When was it founded?
3. Why were the bodies removed?
4. What other persons of interest to me might be listed in addition to those I had listed?

I began investigating. First, I needed to return to the source from which I had copied the names. This was an article “Index to Part I of Removals to Calvary Cemetery,” published in the Chicago Genealogist, the journal of the Chicago Genealogical Society , Vol. 32 No. 2 Winter 1999-2000.  I was very fortunate that a digitized copy of this article was now on the Internet, courtesy of the Newberry Library. (Note that in the digitized list of volumes, there is no table of contents. For that, you need to go to the Chicago Genealogical Society.)

Newberry Library, TonyTheTiger, 2007, 

CC-BY-SA-3

 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/

2.5-2.0-1.0), Wikimedia Commons.

To continue my search at the Newberry site home page, I clicked on the menu tab “Research.” Then I followed these steps: When the menu drops down; click on “Digital Resources and Publications.” Scroll down the page until you see “Chicago Genealogist” and click on it.  When the next page comes up, click again on Chicago Genealogist. In the search box, I typed “Vol 31 No 2.” The next step is to click on the dropdown menu next to “view” and highlight “complete print version.” Then a PDF  of the complete journal contents appears, and you can search the Table of Contents for articles of interest.

As I scanned the Table of Contents, I saw “Old Catholic Cemetery” Records by Helen Sclair. In this article Ms. Sclair answered my first two questions:

Q: Where exactly was the Old Catholic Cemetery and when was it founded?

Ms. Sclair: “In 1843, a cemetery complex was begun near Clark Street and North Avenue. The city of Chicago opened 60 acres for the  ‘City Cemetery’, north of North Avenue and east of Green Bay Road (now Clark Street). The Catholic Church consecrated one block: Dearborn, east to State Street, and North Avenue, south to approximately Burton. Eventually both of these cemeteries would expand, the City’s to 120 acres and the Catholics’ to 5+ city blocks.” (p. 51)

I also learned that from 1858 people began making efforts to stop any more burials and any further expansion of these cemeteries. I presumed that this was because the city was growing and needed the land. A second reason could be that this burial area was very close to Lake Michigan which could cause water issues. But I wanted to make sure that I was on the right track. That’s where my third question came in: Why were the bodies removed? Professor Pamela Bannos answers this question in her website: “Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park”:

One of the most important reasons to move the cemeteries, according to Bannos, was that the land near Lake Michigan was below the water table.

By United States Geological Survey
 [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

 A concern at the time was that bacteria from decaying bodies could contaminate the city’s drinking water. Also when graves were dug, water would often times fill the burial pit. Another reason was that the citizens of the fast growing city decided that building a park (Lincoln Park) for the living could be more advantageous than using the land for housing the departed.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs:

Photography Collection, 

The New York Public Library. "Lincoln Park, Chicago." 

The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-5bf2-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Professor Bannos provides more historical background and maps of the old Catholic Cemetery on the section of her site “Mapping theCemeteries: Catholic Cemetery.” 

Now if asked “How does your country handle the deceased?” many of us would answer that there is great respect for the dead in our culture as evidenced by our funeral system and manicured cemeteries. But if we look a little deeper we find, at least in the instance of the early Chicago cemeteries, that concern for the departed sometimes gives way to the desires and needs of the living. On her site, Professor Bannos provides an eye-opening chronology of what happened to the remains of those buried in these early Chicago graveyards. She does this by presenting news articles from the time period. 

  

An article from the Chicago Daily Tribune issue of August 15, 1876 “Sad Scenes in a Cemetery”, truly captures the disregard given to the interred in the Old Catholic Cemetery as they are removed “…with a degree of recklessness almost criminal in its disrespect for the dead the laborers employed in the exhumation have scattered the remains of the late lamented all through the field.”

The whole removal process seemed slipshod from the first. Was it known exactly how many bodies were in the cemetery and exactly where they were buried? Was it a case of disrespect, indifference, lack of time, or poor records or a mixture of all three that caused many bodies to be left in their watery graves? What is known is that over the years and even up until this decade, bodies keep appearing when digging is done in the area. These occurrences Bannos has chronicled through more Tribune articles in the section "Hidden Truths: Catholic Cemetery." 

Now that I had learned about the history of the Old Catholic Cemetery, I wanted to return to the list of names of those who were fortunate enough to actually be removed and reburied in Calvary Cemetery. As I looked down the list, I saw the usual suspects: Carney/Kearney, Duffy, Cosgrave (Cosgrove), Devine, McKenna, Ryan, Sweeney, and Ward. This was another indication that these people were part of a community. 

This confirmation of the relationship of these families went along with the new information that I had recently found from studying pre-Chicago Fire maps, the 1870 Chicago Directory and Census and the 1870Chicago Illinois US Census. These records showed that members of the Carney, Duffy, Cosgrove, Devine, Sweeney and Ward families lived near each other on the Near North Side streets of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana.

By OpenStreetMap and edited by w:User:TonyTheTigerOpenStreetMap contributors

 [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

On a final note, to get a great narrative and summary of Professor Bannos’ project, “Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park,” check out the article by Jessica Curry “What Lies BeneathLincoln Park” in Chicago Life Magazine.

Categories: genealogy community, genealogy tools

A Trunk full of Treasures

How often do genealogists dream of finding a trunk in a relative’s attic, filled with family documents and photos?

 I had the opportunity last month to meet someone (distantly related to me through the Shelton/Franklin lines) who had such a trunk, although in this case, it was a suitcase.

About six months ago, I saw in the rootsweb.archives, a message about the Sheltons that mentioned an “Alice Lockman” who had a family bible! 

Now that got my attention. I decided to try to find Mrs. Lockman by using some tools available to all of us for free on the internet – the whitepages, anywho or pipl.

When I contacted Alice by telephone, I was so pleased to find out that she is a genealogist who has been studying the Sheltons and related families for many years (she is in her 80s.) Sometime during our talk, Alice mentioned that the family bible had somehow gotten lost, but that she had a “suitcase” full of 30 years of research.  This was the first time in my family history research that I had run across the proverbial “trunk” or, in this case, “suitcase” full of documents. I cannot tell you how excited I felt. We had a lively conversation about some of the family stories including  about Glumdalclitch (see my post of May 24,2013.)

After several more telephone conversations, I asked Alice if I might come to visit her and look at her research, and she was excited to share her discoveries. I learned something very important at this time – many times we might feel hesitant to ask someone we don’t know well if we could look at their research. We fear rejection. But we overlook a human characteristic, highly developed in genealogists:  the desire to show what we have done.

From http://www.vupointsolutions.com/

I prepared my tools for the trip across several states to look in Alice Lockman’s suitcase. My husband was coming along to help with this task. First, I packed my VuPoint portable scanner in case I need to make copies of documents or photos at Alice’s home. I also packed my digital camera (see my post of Oct 9, 2012 to help in making copies if we had a lot to do. I wanted to be sure that I didn’t overstay my visit and wanted to be respectful of Alice’s time and health.

When we arrived at Alice’s home, she and her daughter welcomed us and we chatted awhile. I was excited to get down to the business of finding family history. Remember that I had not experienced this before -- going through a researcher’s life-time collection of documents. I knew my time was limited so I wanted to make the most of it:

Pat Spears photographed by Bert Schuster, May 2013

I noticed that the collection was actually individual papers and many, many personal letters in their envelopes. 

I wasn’t in a library or an archives, but in a home. So there was no “finding aid” of table of contents. Although I’m a researcher and a born organizer, I saw that this was a big task. Well, I just jumped in. I decided to concentrate on the letters. And this was fortuitous as I found some information that was new to me and vital for my family research.

As I looked at the first few letters, I learned about another researcher of the Sheltons/Franklins/Johnsons, in addition to Hobart Franklin and Kenneth Charles Wilde (see my post from May 24, 2013), one who had corresponded with Alice. This researcher was Richard Gosnell, who was related to the Sheltons through his great grandmother. I found the familiar discussion about Glumdalclitch’s son William Duckworth Shelton Franklin in the correspondence but with a new twist. This passage demonstrates what happens when two researchers "talk" with each other about family stories and try to coax out the "facts" from all the lore:

March 11, 1982, Richard Gosnell to Alice Lockman, p. 1

Here is the above passage transcribed for easier reading:

"In the short time that I have had to review the data, I do have a few questions. First, on the family of Roderick and Sarah Briggs Shelton, I noticed that your brother, Charles, listed a son William. I also noticed that a son William was listed on the interview with "Bud" Shelton....At first I thought that this was a reference to Roderick's son, William Duckworth Franklin by Glumdalclitch, but now I'm wondering if Roderick and Sarah also had a son named William."

In the same letter, I found that Richard was also corresponding with Kenneth Wilde: 

March 11, 1982, Richard Gosnell to Alice Lockman, p. 1

I made another very interesting discovery in the Lockman-Gosnell letters, something that has enriched my knowledge of the way my people lived in Madison County, NC in the early 1800s.

Map of Madison County, North Carolina, June 2007, taken from US Census website and modified by User:Ruhrfisch.

 In Richard’s letter of March 11, 1982, he introduces Alice to a fascinating piece of US history (the scan was not legible so I have transcribed the section below):

“If you could locate a copy of the book, ‘The Child thatToileth Not’  (go to the bottom of this page to access the full text) by Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr. (Princeton University Press 1912), I’m sure that you would be interested in reading it….Dawley was appointed as a special investigator by the U.S. Labor Dept to investigate child labor conditions in southern textile mills and to compare the lives of the children in the mills as contrasted to their former lives in the mountains where so many of them came from. Much of Dawley’s investigation was in Madison County, particularly the (Shelton) Laurel section.” (March 11, 1982, Richard Gosnell to Alice Lockman, p. 2)

There was controversy over the report as Dawley describes in the preface, and it was not published by the government. Because he praised the mills as saving children from the hunger and soul-killing toil of the farm, some people familiar with factory conditions thought he was in the pay of the textile industry. But after much effort, Dawley got his findings published privately. Regardless of the controversy, Dawley’s book gives us a rare glimpse into the lives of both adults and children who lived in the late 1800s in North Carolina. These words from the book paint a sad picture of the life of farm children:

“I seemed to hear the cries of their children from their dismal abodes. My thoughts reverted to their half starved bodies and miserable diet of crude corn meal and fat pork, and I could see their begrimed faces and partially clothed bodies draped in filthy rags.” (The Child that Toileth Not, p. IX)

In the early 1900s, a photographer and social reformer, Lewis W. Hine took photographs of mill workers and farm families in many states, including North Carolina and Virginia.

County Map of Virginia, and North Carolina, 1860, Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Wikimedia.

His work provides a companion to Dawley’s photos that appear in his report. In the photo below, Hines shows child laborers in a North Carolina cotton mill:

Some of the sweepers in a cotton mill. North Carolina, 11/1908, National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Next, we see a female child worker in a North Carolina textile mill:

Two young girls working at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC. November 1908, National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine, Library of Congress.

 Another Lewis Hine photograph of a farm family in VA from the early 1900s, provides a glimpse into what Mr. Dawley saw during his research.

Part of the family of R.D. Thomas. He and a boy of 15 are working in the Century Cotton Mill, South Boston, Va., 1911 June, National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine, Library of Congress.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing I found in Dawley’s book, from a family historian’s point of view, was a reference he made to the Sheltons. Richard Gosnell remarked upon this story in his letter to Alice. Here is Dawley’s description of how Shelton Laurel got its name:

Walking Bear, ca. 1850s-1860s, Antoine-Louis Barye,

 in public domain, Wikimedia.

“My host (Jemerson Tweed) was well informed respecting the early settlement of the country. He said that the first settler in those parts was a famous hunter who came over the mountains in Tennessee from Virginia. He had a pack of dogs almost as famous as himself. As long as there was a bear anywhere in the country, he was sure to get it. The name of this bear-hunter was Shelton. He made his last stand on one of three tributaries to the Laurel River which became the Shelton-Laurel, and which in turn gave its name to that entire section of country, notorious for its feuds, fights and killing scrapes.” (The Child that Toileth Not, p. 170)

But Jemerson Tweed had more to say about the Sheltons, and Dawley faithfully recorded his words:

Cumberland Gap, Oct. 2005, Aaron/ConspiracyofHappiness,

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

“The Sheltons were said to be a tall, hardy race from England, who preferred hunting and fighting, to settling down in one place, and pursuing the peaceful occupation of farming. The name may be traced down through the Virginia Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, and it is said that wherever the Sheltons are found to this day, they are known for their fighting proclivities. On the upper Shelton-Laurel in the vicinity of where the original Shelton made his last stand, it is estimated that more than two-thirds of the families bear the name of Shelton.” (The Child that Toileth Not, p. 170)

Oh, how we genealogists love oral testimonies! Of course, we have no proof of the accuracy of Mr. Tweed’s reminiscences or of his motives for sharing them, but it is such stories that inject life into the names, dates and place names that fill our family history sheets.

I am in debt to Alice Lockman for allowing me to read her correspondence with Richard Gosnell, to Richard Gosnell for his discovery of Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr.’s book, and to Mr. Dawley for his efforts to record for posterity the conditions of the lives of the pioneer families of North Carolina’s Shelton Laurel.

I leave you with the reminder that you never know what you will find in your research. For that reason, I recommend following every lead that you uncover.

The Detective's Barnstar, 25 February 2007,by  ChrisO, 

released to public domain by author, Wikimedia

 Even a brief mention of a name in an old message on genforum.com or rootsweb.com can lead to spectacular results if you invest the time and energy into following up.





Categories: document types, genealogy tools, genealogy community

Message Boards v. Mailing Lists

On my last post, Sept 19, I talked about my experience with GenForum, a message board provided by genealogy.com. But until this week, I didn’t know that there was a difference between a message board and a mailing list.

And as happens often in genealogy, you learn something new when you have a question that you need answered and you ask for help. That’s where Kate Herron, my friend/mentor from Chicago, IL, and the mailing list come in.

The question that I needed answered came from a marriage license for my maternal great grandparents, Peter Fleseras and Louise Miller. I found the document at FamilySearch.org.

 The document says the marriage was performed by the rector of St. Andrews in Chicago, IL in 1901. But I couldn’t read the name of the rector. Hard- to-read handwriting is one of the things that plague genealogists.

I know that Peter Fleseras was Greek and that Louis Miller’s father (Frederick Miller) was German and her mother (Catherine Norton) was Irish, from County Mayo. Which church would they probably have attended? Greek Orthodox? Catholic? Protestant?

I googled for St. Andrew in Chicago, IL and found both a Greek Orthodox and a Catholic.The Greek Orthodox St.Andrew opened in 1926 – after the 1901 marriage. The Catholic St. Andrew opened in 1895 – well in time for the 1901 event.

I tried some analysis on my own. Catholics don’t usually write “clergyman” on a document. They put “priest”. And “rector” didn’t seem to be the usual Catholic choice of words either.

I was stumped so I e-mailed Kate for help. Kate suggested that I post a message on the Cook County Mailing List, gave me the following web address, said to be sure I linked to my marriage document, and told me to be careful to use digest mode: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/usa/IL/cook.html

Well, this gave me plenty of challenges. I didn’t know that rootsweb.com had a mailing list function although I had been using their WorldConnect section for years (see future post). Second, I didn’t know what “digest mode” meant. And third, I didn’t know how to “link” inside a mailing list post.

Here’s where I can offer a piece of advice: never abuse your community of friends and mentors by asking pesky questions that you can find the answers for yourself. Save them for the BIG questions. So I started educating myself about message boards and mailing lists.

I went to the wikipedia site on internet forums to find out exactly what these two forms of communication are and how they differ. To paraphrase wikipedia, a message board, or web forum, is an internet discussion site where people have conversations that take the form of back and forth message postings.

A mailing list (in the link scroll down to "Comparison with other Web applications")  is also an internet discussion site with posted messages. It differs from a message board mainly in how messages are retrieved. On a mailing list, new messages come directly to your e-mail inbox; whereas on a message board, you have to log-on to the site to see messages. Some message boards, like GenForum, will send you an e-mail notification that there are messages waiting for you at the forum site.

stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

My next self-education step was to find out what was “digest mode”. I returned to rootsweb.com and went to the Help section.The difference this time comes in the way you receive messages from the list. In “mail mode”, you receive each single message at the time it is sent to the list. That could be a lot of messages in your inbox. In “digest mode” you receive a group of messages once a day or so. This latter way cuts way down on traffic to your inbox.

Armed with this information, I was ready to go. I subscribed to Cook-CO-IL-L by following the instructions at that site.  I received a message response from the administrator of the list that  included an address of the list that I should send my messages to.

I posted my message on Cook-CO-IL-L on Tuesday, Sept 20, 2011 and in two days received several answers. I hit the jackpot with the message suggesting that I check out the 1900 Lakeside Chicago City Directory at ChicagoAncestor.org.

stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Now this is a funny thing about genealogy researching. Many times we know about a particular resource and may have even used it several times before. But then we may file it away in our minds and not think of it. This is what happened in this case. Well, I wasted no time going to the ChicagoAncestors site and in the front section of the directory, I struck gold. On p. 18 there was a list of churches in 1900 Chicago. Can you imagine how I felt when I saw:

St. Andrew’s Church – Washington boul(evard) Cor(ner) S. Robey. Rector, Rev. W.C. DeWitt.

This was it! As I looked back at the nearly indecipherable signature of the clergyman on the license, everything just fell into place.

You can be sure that I will make more use of the mailing list feature of rootsweb.com in the future.  And by the way, rootsweb.com also has a message board feature.

Categories: genealogy community, genealogy tool

Building a Community with GenForum



 

Stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Many people have heard the old expression: “Two heads (or more) are better than one”. In genealogy this axiom is especially true. But I didn’t find this out until years after I had been researching on my own.

Probably like you, I just started my family research by looking at the census and talking to relatives (of which I have only a few that are known to me).

 Soon I was sending away for records and finding many pieces. Sometimes the pieces just didn’t fit together.

 

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

When I moved to Augusta, GA in 2006, I met A.S., a very talented genealogist who has become a good friend. Not too soon after we met, I had an idea that if I could find some living relatives in the Kreis line, I might be able to make some of my pieces fit. But I wondered -- how best to do this?

A.S. suggested that I post a message on GenForum.com. Well going public like that intimidated me back then. I was concerned about privacy issues. However, the drive to find out more family information overrode my initial reluctance. And I can truly say that posting on GenForum became one of the most valuable and rewarding things I have ever done in genealogy. And another benefit is that it is easy to do with a computer.

stock photo from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Now back in the days before the internet, if you wanted to put out a query or question about an ancestor, you had to search for a place to post it. If you were lucky enough to live near a genealogy society, you could post it on a bulletin board there. Or you could search for a genealogy journal or magazine that covered the geographic area where your ancestor lived. Then you could leave your address and wait until someone who might know of your ancestor might look at the journal/magazine and might see your posting. Well you can see that the probability of success was not too great.

stock photo from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

But now we are in the Age of the Internet. And this is where GenForum.com comes in. If you go to the home page, you will see that GenForum uses what the company calls “forums” to guide people to groups of interest to them. These groups or forums are arranged around surnames and geographic place names. There are forums for US cities, counties and states and for countries all over the world. And if you can’t find a forum that fits your needs, you can start one!

Besides posting to a forum, you can also search archived messages in a forum. If you are looking for “Henry Kreis”, you can go to the Kreis forum and put “Henry Kreis” in the search box.

Next it’s time to post your own messages. Think of all the possible forums that might lead you to some new information on your family. In my case, I posted to my surnames and to the states where they lived in America. I haven’t yet been able to identify for many of my ancestors the county/city/town where they came from in Europe, so I haven’t posted to many international forums.

Both the opportunities and the power of this medium are incredible. I once put a general message on the Greek forum and received a response from a very kind genealogist in Athens who isn’t related to me at all but just likes to help Americans learn more about their Greek roots.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Posting on the Chicago forum in GenForum helped me find a wonderful genealogist who lives in Chicago and has helped me many times to think through a puzzle. If left to my own devices, I might slowly sink into one of many genealogical sand traps:

• Tyring to force a “fit” when there isn’t one
• Not being able to see the forest for the trees
• Overlooking a clue that is right there crying out for you to see
• Looking in the wrong place for a record and not knowing where the right place might be

And this is to name just a few.

In conclusion, two heads (and more) are needed to be successful at genealogy. Or to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, “It takes a village to do family research successfully.” So start building your village with GenForum.

Categories: genealogy community, research terms