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

Stepping back to Nineteenth Century Chicago

You’re invited on a trip back to nineteenth century Chicago. We’ll drop in on the Near West Side around Halsted and Maxwell Streets. Your ticket for this adventure is an almost forgotten nineteenth century novel, Just Folks by Clara Elizabeth Laughlin, first published in 1907.

Inside cover of Just Folks, available through InterLibrary Loan

I was introduced to Just Folks when I was preparing for my research trip to Chicago in September of 2012. I was googling sources about life in the 1870s in the Near West Side, the neighborhood where my Carney/Kearney family lived. I happened upon the website for the Northern Illinois University Libraries’ Illinois Periodicals Online(IPO) project. The goal of IPO is to digitize Illinois-based magazines so that the public will have easy access. 

When I googled for “life in 19^th century Chicago,” one of the hits was an article by Robert Bray, “The Chicago Novel, 1890-1915.”  Mr. Bray mentioned two novels that I was quite familiar with from high school and college: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. But Mr. Bray also discussed several novels about life in late 1800s Chicago written by women, one of which was Just Folks. Although the book is hard to find, the complete text of  Just Folks is available on-line.

The main character in the novel is Beth Tully, a young woman who has just arrived in Chicago from a small Illinois town to be a juvenile probation officer on the Near West Side, which is shown in the map below:

1876 map of Chicago from davidrumsey.com, wikimedia

Laughlin’s opening lines plunge the reader into the environs of the Near West Side, mentioning two neighborhood streets, a government building, and America’s first settlement house, Hull House:

“On her way over from the Juvenile Court building, on Ewing Street east of Halsted, Beth Tully stopped at the arched entrance to Hull House….” (p. 1)

This building at 771 West Ewing Street  has the distinction of being the first juvenile court building in the world. Later in this posting, we'll see why this court devoted to juveniles was placed on the Near West Side.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Near West Side was one of the most crowded, poverty-filled areas in Chicago. The Chicago Fire of 1871 was a large contributing factor to the gross overcrowding as people who lost their homes to the flames fled to the Near West Side. Also, before and after the fire, a continuing stream of new immigrants came to this part of town because of the proximity to factory jobs and the availability of low rent housing. 

The housing stock in the Near West Side may have been cheap and plentiful, but there was a downside – people were packed into flimsy tenement buildings that were dark, had no running water, had few privies for the number of tenants, and were prone to fires.

Photo Courtesy Chicago History Museum Archive, Slums Exteriors

Laughlin does a good job of describing the interior of a tenement: 

“The house was of a familiar type, two tenants on each floor and four rooms constituting each tenement. The kitchens were in the middle of the house and off each kitchen was a tiny bedroom. The ‘front room’ of the rear dwellers overlooked the back yard, the alley, and the backs of houses on the next street; and off it was a small bedroom. The front room of the other tenants on each floor …overlooked Maxwell Street; and off it was a small bedroom.” (p.8)

Laughlin captures the overwhelming presence of poverty that permeated every square inch of the Near West Side:

“Beth followed the woman through the ‘front room’…into the kitchen, which was stifling with heat and damp and that peculiar acrid odor – compounded of mustiness and personal uncleanness and stale odors of strong cooking – which every visitor to the homes of the poor knows as ‘the poverty smell.’”  (p. 27)

Now that we are familiar with the scent of poverty in 19^th century Chicago’s Near West Side, we are treated to a word picture by Laughlin of some of the busiest streets in that area:

“(from Henry Street)They went over to Halsted…and walked slowly up to Madison on the east side of the street where, for some occult reason, the five-cent theatre does not flourish. From this comparatively sedate side, they looked over to the gaudy other side where penny arcades and saloons with free vaudeville, and nickelodeons, and gaudy Greek candy parlors, vie with the groggeries (saloons) and the pawnshops in number.” (p. 95)

Following  Laughlin’s verbal description of Madison Street, here is a photograph of Maxwell Street, that is mentioned often in Just Folks, to give you a visual impression of the area:

(Credit: Photo Courtesy of Barnes Crosby and Chicago Historical Society; found on http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/services-shopping/maxwell-street-PLTRA0000133.topic)

Laughlin not only gives us a geographic grounding in the Near West Side, she also gives us a glimpse of the basic institutions in the people’s lives. Just Folks began with the Juvenile Courthouse which played a big part in the day-to-day life of the people because poverty can spawn hopelessness, and without hope the young can turn to crime as a way out.

One institution that worked to bring hope to its neighbors on the Near West Side was Hull House.

Hull House, Smith Hall, view north on South Halsted, 1910, wikimedia, from
The American Memory Collections, Library of Congress

Jane Adams established Hull House in 1889 because she wanted to provide help to the very poor in this area. In Laughlin’s book, Beth Tully thought that she could learn how to help the people by living amidst them rather than on the grounds of Hull House. Through the sentiments of Tully (p.4), Laughlin presents the mission of Hull House from the viewpoint of the people it served: rather than asking what the people wanted, those in charge of the House gave what they thought was needed. And sometimes these were the same and other times they were not.

Another institution that brought hope to its members on the Near West Side was the Catholic Church. In his book The Irish Americans: A History pgs 111-115, which can be found on books.google, Jay P. Dolan discusses the community, educational, and spiritual roles that the church played in the daily lives of its members. And it was the church that helped lift the second generation of Irish children out of poverty by teaching them the mores of America and by giving them the skills they needed to get better jobs in the parish schools, such as at Holy Family Catholic Church: 

Holy Family Church (1857) and St. Ignatius College Prep High School, (not pictured), 1869, Chicago IL, wikimedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Catholic Church was there at the beginning of a person’s life to administer baptism, as Laughlin describes: 

“He was to be christened on Tuesday…in the Holy Family Church.” (p. 215)

Due to the unsanitary conditions, the lack of medical treatment and poor nutrition because of poverty, many young children died very early on the Near West Side. My great, great grandparents, John Kearney and Mary Duffy, faced this tragedy when their son, Patrick William Kearney, died at age two in 1879. The Catholic Church was also present at the end of life when people were given the last rites and buried in a Catholic cemetery, as Laughlin describes:

“…in two days after he was christened, wee Patsy was dead….They owned a single grave in Calvary (Cemetery); in it were the two children that were dead these many years….”  (p. 216-217)

In Laughlin’s book, we have seen where and how people lived on the Near West Side, where they were baptized, worshipped, went to school, and were buried (the Catholics, that is.) One last aspect of life that was still in existence when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1950s was where they played – the amusement park of Riverview.  The Park didn’t actually open until 1904 as Riverview. Before that in the late 1800s it was called German Sharpshooter Park with picnic grounds and swings. Below is the front entrance to Riverview: Postcard photo of the entrance of Riverview Park, Chicago circa 1908. One of my favorite rides at Riverview was Shoot the Chutes Postcard photo of the Chutes ride at Riverview Park, Chicago, wikimedia. where you were carried up a tower in a small boat (kind of like an elevator.) At the top of the tower, the boat came out onto a large slide. And you shot down the “chute.” Postcard photo of the Chutes at Riverview Park, Chicago, wikimedia It looks like the characters in Just Folks also enjoyed riding the chutes:

“…an’ be taking’ ye t’ shoot th’ chutes.” (p. 142)

We have come to the end of our visit to the Near West Side of Chicago in the 19^th century. A branch of my family started their life in Chicago right there, but fortunately the next generation was able to move out from the deep poverty. It was only a move of a few miles north to Chestnut and Wells for them, but it was a huge step in improving their quality of life.

Categories: genealogy tools

Getting to Know an Ancestral Cemetery

To genealogists, cemeteries are repositories of much more than bodies. In fact, cemeteries may hold information on tombstones and in sexton records (if we’re really lucky) that gives us parents’ names and dates of birth and death or other details on those buried there.

To get the most out of a trip to an ancestral cemetery, one needs a little bit of “cemetery savvy” which I described in a posting of Feb22, 2012. I covered points such as at-home preparation through studying websites and calling the cemetery or sexton’s office for information. This communication may help you learn a lot about exactly where your ancestor is buried and if there are any burial cards available to tell who bought the grave lot. Also in that posting, I linked to a website which gives instructions on the do’s and don’ts of tombstone cleaning.

Before I came to Chicago on my September 2012 research trip, I had found a map of Calvary Cemetery online, and I had talked a few times with both members of the staff, John F. Geary and Thomas J. Berry. I called before I left to let them know I was coming.

Also I was fortunate to have met Craig Pfannkuche, a genealogist steeped in Chicago history, through the Newberry Library’s listing of Chicago area researchers. Craig had done some on-the-ground research for me in Chicago records a few years ago. Now it was my opportunity to meet him in person. As a true lover of Chicago and its rich past, Craig offered to be my guide to Calvary and any other place in the city.

Photo taken by Bert Schuster 9/24/2012

Well, the big day finally came. I was so excited to be standing in front of the Calvary Cemetery Office, wearing my backpack filled with tombstone cleaning supplies. So many times I had pictured myself right here, at the edge of the cemetery, ready to find the grave of Patrick William Kearney, the brother of my great grandmother, Mary Kearney Kries Lauer.

Photo taken by Pat Spears 9/24/2012

Photo courtesy of Calvary Cemetery

Our first step was to say hello to Tom Berry  who was on duty the morning of our visit. He directed Craig, my husband Bert, and me to the kiosk which houses a computer database that gives grave location information.  All you have to do is key in your ancestor’s name, and a cemetery map comes up with a diagram of the grave location for this person. I put in the name of Patrick William Kearney and printed out the map. Then we headed to Section H, Block 25, Lot 191. 

Photo taken by Bert Schuster 9/24/2012

I knew there was no marker for Patrick’s grave as Tom Berry had told me that it was a charity grave. Luckily Craig was with me or I would not have been able to locate the block or the lot. He has quite a bit of cemetery sleuthing experience. Using the larger cemetery map and an enlarged

image of Section H, Craig was able to identify Block 25, Lot 191. For the first time in 133 years, someone had come to honor the memory of two-year old Patrick William Kearney.

Patrick William Kearney gravesite, Calvary Cemetery

Only after I left Chicago and returned home did I realize that I wanted to check into putting a monument on Patrick’s grave. More about this in a future posting.

Our next stop was to visit the grave site of the Sweeney/Brookins/Dinan family, a collateral group in the Kearney/Carney network of friends, associates and neighbors. It took a little longer to find the family plot as there were so many tombstones in Section U, Lot S18. Unfortunately there was only one marker for this group of eleven family members.

  This marker was barely visible under the grass that had grown over it and the hard clumps of dirt that clung to the grass. And here is where I learned that I needed to bring yet another tool to the cemetery:

Craig was on his knees, busily pulling aside grass and brushing dirt away so that we could more easily read the marker.

Photo taken by Bert Schuster 9/24/2012

At last, we could make out the inscription: Ida M. Schuerman and Walter C. Schuerman.

Photo taken by Bert Schuster 9/24/2012

 I believe that Ida was the granddaughter of Catherine Sweeney Brookins Dinan. Catherine was one of the baptismal sponsors, along with her son Charles Dinan, for my great grandmother’s first child, Henrietta Kreis.

And so ended our day at the cemetery.  We had talked first with the staff

Photo taken by Pat Spears 9/24/2012

of the cemetery who had given me much information over the years before my visit. We had printed out maps from a new technology  -- the kiosk -- available at Chicago Catholic cemeteries. Using the maps, we had found one unmarked grave for an ancestor and a marked grave for a collateral family member. And best of all, I had reaped the benefits of having a local person, Craig, show us around the cemetery. 

Eliminate to Isolate

Does this sound familiar? I have an ancestor, my great, great grandfather with a very common name, John Carney/Kearney, and I have found very few records that can link the right “John Carney/Kearney,” out of the many wrong ones, to me. The first record I have is my great grandmother’s, Mary Carney Kreis Lauer, second marriage license application, where she lists her father as “John Carney” and her mother as “Mary Duffy.” No other identifying facts are given such as his address, occupation, or birth date. However, in the 1900 Chicago US Census, Mary gives her parents’ birth places as Ireland.

The second, and last, record that I have is a baptism certificate for Patrick William Kearney from 1877, born to “John Kearney” and “Mary Duffy.” One clue is that Patrick was baptized in St. Patrick’s Church in Chicago. He died only two years later and was buried in Calvary Cemetery near Chicago.

For the past several months, I have been looking at addresses and occupations for “John Carneys”, using the Chicago city directories online and trying to match these to the 1870 and 1880 Chicago US census documents, using Ancestry.com (fee-based) and HeritageQuest.com (can be used for free at home through most local libraries.) My non-strategy or haphazard approach has been to take each case individually, record my findings on a separate sheet of paper and place the sheets in a file folder. In between, I work on other lines.

Just yesterday, I realized that I need to have one place (instead of a pile) to record my findings so that I can really “see” what I have. Strategy # 1 -- create a spreadsheet/chart. I started with the 1870 Chicago US Census. In the HeritageQuest.com US census search window, when you search on a name in a particular state, a page comes up with all the appearances of that name in the different counties in the state. Here is what HeritageQuest shows for Cook County:

Because no addresses are given on the 1870 census, I decided to combine the census information with the city directory addresses – strategy # 2. Since “John Carney” is such a common name, there are six listed in the 1870 directory! I faced quite a hurdle. But I decided to look at the census page to check out if there were neighbors listed who had more unusual names. Then I might find their addresses to correlate with the “John Carney” on the same census page – strategy # 3. 

With this backdoor technique, I was only able to find one address for one “John Carney” in the 1870 census – Wallace St. Even though I found some very unusual names of neighbors of different “John Carneys”, these names didn’t appear in the directory.

Although I only had one address for the “John Carneys” under investigation, I could still use the 1870 census to differentiate among the seven listed. I used the variables of age, marriage partner and name of children as eliminators. I was looking for men who were old enough (and too old) to have fathered my great grandmother in 1876. I used age 20 - 40 as the age range, which gave a birth year of 1836-1856. Using this strategy, I eliminated 3 men, leaving me 4 possibilities, but I knew the address of only one of them – Wallace St. I needed to go forward to the next census in 1880 where addresses were given.

By 1880, there were many more “John Carneys” in Chicago, 26 to be exact, but only 9 were born in Ireland. And 12 “John Carneys” appeared in the 1880 city directory. By using the same variables that I used in the 1870 elimination process, I was able to come up with 4 candidates from the census. But only one of the four target addresses appeared in the 1880 city directory –3558 Wallace St. While I could eliminate 5 of the 11 remaining listings using the census records, I was left with six to add to my list of possibilities!

But I am undaunted. I know I am closer to identifying my John Carney than I was before. And that is worth the three days of work this project took.

Categories: census, genealogy professional, genealogy education, genealogy tools, research terms