Cemeteries are treasure troves of information about the past.
Family tree researchers rely on the information engraved on the gravestones to construct their family trees, and history story researchers use this information to build accurate and exciting local history stories.
The primary cemeteries in the Fairbury area include Graceland Cemetery, Graceland South, Avoca Cemetery, Cooper Cemetery, Weston Cemetery, St. Johns Catholic Cemetery, South Apostolic Christian Cemetery, Cropsey Cemetery, Fairview Cemetery, and the Spence Cemetery.
One of the earliest attempts to gather gravestone information from Livingston County cemeteries was a survey prompted by the Illinois State Legislature in 1929. The State of Illinois funded a study to identify where every veteran was buried in Illinois. This study resulted in the publication of a book titled Roll of Honor: Record of Burial Places of Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Army Nurses of All Wars of the United States Buried in the State of Illinois. The wars covered by this study included the Blackhawk War, the Civil War, the Indian War, the Mexican War, the Revolutionary War, the Spanish War, and World War I. Many veterans of these wars were buried in Fairbury area cemeteries. This book has been converted to a PDF file and is available online.
The Illinois Veteran's Commission conducted a similar study of veteran burials in Illinois in 1956. It covered all veteran burials through 1955. Copies of the results for Livingston County veterans' burials are available online.
Mary B. Patterson (1921-2006) was born at Cornell in 1921 and attended Cornell schools. She then worked at the Pontiac Chair Company. She married Arnold Peterson in 1938, and he died in 1980. She later married Lloyd Erickson in 1981 at Tuscola. Mary was a member of the Livingston County Historical Society.
In the 1970s, Mary and some of her friends visited every cemetery in Livingston County and recorded the information from the gravestones. In 1976, she published a two-volume set of books titled Livingston County Cemetery Records. As of 2024, these two books have not been converted to a digital format. Her books are at the Pontiac Public Library and the Fairbury Dominy Memorial Library. Her book project was the first to attempt to capture all the burials in every cemetery in Livingston County.
In the 1990s, Salt Lake City resident Jim Tipton was a self-described nerdy kid who was fascinated with finding graves of famous celebrities and had a hobby of learning HTML software used to create websites.
The Internet started to be widely used by the general public in 1994. In 1995, Jim Tipton developed a new website he named Find A Grave. He converted it to a commercial entity in 1998. Users of the website can add new information about grave sites. The website can also be searched to find information about ancestors. There is no cost to utilize this website. According to the Find a Grave website, there are 84 cemeteries in Livingston County.
In 2013, Tipton sold his Find a Grave website to Ancestry.com, the largest website for conducting genealogical research. Users of Ancestry.com must pay a monthly subscription fee of $25 per month as of 2024. Ancestry.com has automatic links to the Find A Grave website for users constructing family trees of their ancestors.
Because the Find A Grave website does not require a subscription, many people upload obituaries and family photos to it, which users can access at no cost.
For many years, the Fairbury Dominy Library website has had a link that allows users to search Graceland Cemetery for free. Once a user gets to the library's website, the tab labeled "Resources" is clicked, and then the tab "Cemetery Records" is selected. Users can then search the Graceland Cemetery records by the deceased's last name. The information for some of the people buried in unmarked graves is also included in the results.
The most recent project, which was to construct a database of all burials in the 21 cemeteries in the Prairie Central School district, was initiated by geography teacher Andrew Quain in the fall of 2015. Mr. Quain and his geography students visited local cemeteries and recorded all the information on the gravestones. This data was then entered into a Google Maps database, which is word-searchable for ancestors. This database can be accessed at this Internet address: https://prairiecentralil.sites.thrillshare.com/page/geography-class-cemetery-project.
As of 2024, fifteen of the twenty-one cemeteries in the Prairie School district have been analyzed. The six cemeteries that have not been analyzed yet include the Pike, Calvary Catholic, Cooper, Graceland South, North Apostolic Christian, and Strawn cemeteries.
The 15 cemeteries that have been analyzed include the Chenoa, Payne, Weston, Fairview, Spence, Avoca, Graceland, St. John’s Catholic, South Apostolic Christian, Cropsey, Forrest, Pleasant Ridge, St. Patrick’s Catholic, Germanville, and Chatsworth-Charlotte cemeteries.
In recent years, the trend towards cremations versus burials of the deceased in a cemetery has become very strong. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the national median cost of a funeral with a viewing and burial in a cemetery in 2023 was $8,300, while the median cost of a funeral with a cremation was $6,280.
Because cremations are less expensive than burials, the 2024 cremation rate is projected to be 62%, and the burial rate is projected to be 33%. By 2045, the cremation rate is expected to reach 82%.
Unfortunately, the decreasing number of burials with gravestones will reduce the amount of information available to future family researchers from cemeteries. Since many newspapers continue to go out of business, obituaries from newspapers will be less available to researchers in the future. Future researchers will have to rely on obituary information published on the Internet from the various funeral homes in the geographical area being researched.
(Dale Maley's local history feature is sponsored each week on Fairbury News by Dr. Charlene Aaron)
