This blog post isn't going to be about my relatives...or even tangential relatives, and that is what is unexpected!I've been studying my family's genealogy for well over 15 years. I have made trees, purchased Ancestry subscriptions, and combed records and newspapers for mentions of people I have never met and never will meet. None of this was unexpected from a genealogical point of view, but what I didn't expect is that I would put my genealogical skills to use for my part-time job, city alder(wo)man.
With my installment on the city council, I inherited the responsibility of chair of the West Cemetery Board. Bestowed upon the city by Abner Hall as he lay on his death bed in 1843, Old West/West/Abner Hall Cemetery is the oldest landmark in the city of Athens. The cemetery boasts a Revolutionary War soldier and many of the earliest pioneers of the town. At almost 200 years old, the historical value of the cemetery should have been obvious, and its records should have been well-maintained, but they were not. If you believe local lore, the story goes that a member of the cemetery board possessed all relevant records, but upon his death, his children burned much of their father’s old documents - including cemetery paperwork. It is hard to say how much of the story is true, but one thing is certain. No complete record of cemetery burials has ever been found.
This past summer, another cemetery board member and I tried to remedy almost two centuries of deferred maintenance as we began using a GIS mapping system to generate a map of graves/headstones in the cemetery. The process was slow-going, as many headstones are broken, half buried, and/or illegible, and many other burials are unmarked (the cemetery was given as free burial ground, but even though burials were free, monuments were not). We eventually had to turn to a company that specialized in GPR (ground penetrating radar) surveys. The company came in and identified almost 300 unmarked graves, and is in the process of generating a map complete with GPS locations of all marked and unmarked burials.
What does this mean for me? Well, I've been spending weeks poring over The History of Menard County Through Its Cemeteries: West Cemetery and The Menard County Historical Society Book of Cemeteries and Burials Menard County, Illinois, Vol. 5, published in 1999 and 2013 respectively. Both books have proven invaluable as I have tried to piece together a complete interment record for the cemetery. Using websites like Ancestry and Newspapers, I have proven (and disproven) information, and I am in the final stages of submitting a spreadsheet complete with names, dates of birth and death, veteran status, and any obituaries that I could locate. This information will be combined with the final map from the GPR survey and made available on our city's website.
I am a "transplant" in this community, having lived here only 19 years, but - quite unexpectedly - I've found a way to connect as I've researched the founding families of my little town.
