Earlier this month, the world was shocked and disgusted by the news of the abuse at Burr Oak Cemetery, near Alsip, Illinois.
Yesterday, July 30, a new memorial database for those buried in the cemetery debuted, sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. This database contains photographs of over 9,500 headstones of those interred in the cemetery, which are all available to view from the site. The sheriff's office, who created this database, will continue to update with additional photos of the nearly 100,000 graves at the cemetery.
From the homepage, you can either search for a specific surname, or browse the stones by decade of death.
The database falls a little short for genealogists. Having been created by police officers rather than genealogists, the database is not particularly careful with the details. One example is the image of the headstone of one "Emma Nelson Lovett," who was born in 1854 and died in 1937. The database lists her as "Emma Nelson Love," and one look at the photo explains why: grass and shadows obscure the last two letters of her name. So it would seem that the database index is being created from the photos themselves.
Another drawback is that several gravestones appear to represent either people who are not yet deceased, or decedents whose dates of death were not engraved on the stones. The year engraved on these stones appears on the left, with a blank area on the right side of the stone. Yet this presumed date of birth appears as the date of death in the database.
Despite these shortcomings, the diligent genealogist can still accomplish much using this site. First, one can easily search for confirmation of the date of death using either the Illinois state death certificate database or the Social Security Death Index. One can then gather additional information concerning these individuals using the federal census, and other records.
Take the example of John and Love Jaycox, an African-American couple buried at the cemetery. The Illinois death database confirms their dates of death as 1 October 1944 and 13 Jun 1943, respectively.
Using the census, we discover that John was born in North Carolina in about 1860, and Love was born in Kentucky in 1864.
This site obviously does not contain as much information as other gravestone databases, such as Find-A-Grave, but it was not designed for the purposes of genealogy, so this should be expected. However, it does provide a welcome resource for this cemetery, especially considering the tragic events here over the past few months.
To visit the memorial database, visit http://burroakmemorial.com/.
The Sheriff of Cook County also has a website dedicated to Burr Oak cemetery, where you are able to search the database of gravestones. This site is available at http://burroak.net/index.html. A comparison has not yet been conducted, so it is unknown whether both of these sites use the same database.
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