When 13-year-old Annie Daggitt died of pneumonia in 1845, her heartbroken English immigrant father, Robert, buried her on a peaceful, sunny knoll on his farm in what now is southeast Highland Park. Within a year, two more of Daggitt`s nine children died: James, 18, killed by a falling tree; and Rachel, 21, of what was referred to as consumption, according to records compiled by the Highland Park Historical Society. Their graves, and those that Daggitt sold to his pioneer neighbors at $1 apiece, became what was then called Grace Cemetery, now known as Braeside Cemetery.
A more recent family tragedy is told by a pair of markers in the Lake Forest Cemetery. W. Philip McNulty III and his daughter Anabel Lee are buried side by side. They died on July 19, 1989, in the crash landing of a commercial jetliner that somersaulted into a cornfield just short of an Iowa runway. The angular modern sculpture that was placed above the McNulty headstones stands out in the garden of sedate, traditional gray granite monuments that is Lake Forest Cemetery.
The avante-garde artwork was such a controversial thing that some families with cemetery plots near it asked to be relocated farther away, cemetery sexton Bill Borzick confided. ”I guess they think it is strange, but they don`t know the sad story behind it,” he said.
There are lots of stories, and lots of history, buried in Lake County`s cemeteries. Lake Forest genealogist Shirley Paddock, who is compiling materials for a book on the Lake Forest Cemetery for the Lake Forest Historical Society, is like a detective searching for clues as she walks among the rows of impressive monuments erected there.
Paddock`s fascination with cemeteries goes way back. ”I used to take my children on walks to the cemetery. I didn`t want to scare them by explaining what a cemetery was, so I`d just say, `let`s go to the park.` My son was 8 years old before he knew that a cemetery wasn`t a park,” Paddock said with a laugh.
Several years ago, Paddock published a booklet on the meaning of some common symbols and epitaphs found on many headstones. She has restored some of the older monuments in the East Fox Lake Cemetery, in Lake Villa, where many of her ancestors are buried, and has traced husband Harold`s family back to the Mayflower.
”A cemetery to me is more than just the people who are buried there. A cemetery is your last chance to make a statement,” Paddock declared. The Lake Forest Cemetery, for example, says a lot about the wealth of the town and the people who lived there and elsewhere on the posh North Shore. Located on the lakefront, spanning several ravines, it is designed in the same way as the city, with graceful winding roads and tall, stately trees.
Many of the monuments are impressive, such as the 25-foot-high pink granite obelisk dedicated to the Farwells, a prominent family in Lake Forest history. The Marshall Field and William McCormick Blair family plots are ornamented with classical sculptures, while the spacious lot that W. Clement Stone purchased for his family is designated by massive, boldly carved slabs of black granite.
Mausoleums, resembling small Greek or Roman temples, grace a few of the larger lots. Smaller stones on some family plots mark the graves of beloved family retainers. ”They treated their servants very well,” Paddock said. The elegant, predominantly upscale cemetery also includes a working-class section, as Paddock described it. ”The lots are smaller and the monuments aren`t as big.”
The graves of scores of children tell the sad story of the 1918 influenza epidemic that was carried home by soldiers who fought in France during World War I. The touching, often poetic epitaphs on those headstones and on those of other young children reflect the anguish of their parents. ”Full short his journey was, no dust his sandals clave,” reads the simple monument dedicated to one small boy.
Many of those buried in the Lake Forest Cemetery planned their own monuments and dictated their own, occasionally cryptic, epitaphs.
”The dogs bark but the caravan passes,” reads the headstone on the grave of George A. Poole III. ”I knew him. He told me that what it meant was that he lived his life without caring what other people thought,” Borzick, the cemetery sexton, explained.
One of the most unusual monuments belongs to the McBirney family. Its centerpiece is a 5-foot-long table engraved with the names of parents, children and grandchildren. Surrounding it, set flat into the ground, are nine individual headstones. ”They`re not in a row. They`re actually arranged as if they were seated around the table,” Paddock said.
The Lake Forest Cemetery was placed on the lakefront because the early residents of the area considered it ”damp, windy and not suitable for building,” according to records unearthed by Paddock. The 55-acre parcel was purchased originally by a man named Henry Short, who paid $1.25 per acre. He sold it in 1857 to Judge Henry Blodgett, who quickly resold it, at a considerable profit, to the newly formed Forest Cemetery Association.
In 1883, the western portion of the grounds was deeded to the Roman Catholic bishop of Chicago. That area is now known as St. Mary`s Cemetery. A smaller, lesser known Catholic cemetery lies in west Lake Forest. According to Libertyville history buff F.T. ”Mike” Graham, who has an ancestor buried there, St. Patrick`s cemetery began about 1840.
The records for most of Lake County`s Roman Catholic cemeteries are now kept in the offices of Ascension Cemetery in Libertyville. The early records were kept by individual parishes, however, and are sometimes very sketchy, Ascension sexton Dennis Roth said. For avid genealogists such as Paddock, the headstones in a cemetery are only one piece of the historical puzzle. Getting the whole truth requires comparing the monuments with cemetery records, birth, marriage and death certificates kept by local governments, newspaper obituaries and even individual family memoirs.
A headstone doesn`t necessarily mean there was a burial, Paddock also noted. Some monuments were erected by families in memory of loved ones killed in faraway battles or buried near an earlier family home. Even by themselves, however, the monuments in each graveyard tell the casual observer a lot about the lives of those memorialized there.
At Braeside Cemetery in Highland Park and tiny St. Peter Cemetery in Volo, for example, many of the names on the headstones are German, reflecting the background of those who settled those areas in the 19th Century. Instead of the words ”born” and ”died,” some are inscribed with the German equivalents, ”geboren” and ”gestorben.”
It is common in many early cemeteries to see family plots with the headstones of six or seven children who died in their first few years of life, reflecting the high infant and child mortality rates of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
The dates of death of more than a few women coincide with the dates of birth of their last children, a clue to the risks they also took. ”You have to admire those women. They had to be strong. Every time they had a child, they risked their own lives,” Paddock noted.
Oakwood contains the graves not only of veterans of the Civil War but of the War of 1812. Some of the headstones date to the late 1830s, predating the city of Waukegan, which was founded in 1849 under the name Little Fort. In those days, the cemetery was nearer the lake than it is now. In 1851, the very practical town fathers decreed that the graveyard-bodies, headstones and all- be moved to a 17-acre property on the top of the bluff so that railroad lines could be built along the lake.
Like many genealogy buffs, Ann Darrow of Waukegan got hooked when she started trying to trace her own ancestors and the ancestors of husband James. ”It`s almost like a puzzle,” she said. ”You do research and you find one piece of information and then that raises questions and you have to look for more information. Once you start genealogy, you can`t stop.”
Ellen Frew, president of the Waukegan Historical Society, shares Darrow`s enthusiam. ”It makes history so much more exciting, so much more personal, if you look at it in terms of specific people,” she said. The dean of Lake County`s genealogists is, without a doubt, Mundelein resident Joan Roden.
As chairwoman of the Lake County Genealogical Society`s Cemetery Committee, Roden has taken on the Herculean task of documenting burials in almost all of the county`s 72 known cemeteries. She and her band of dedicated followers began their project in 1980 and have completed and published their findings for seven townships thus far.
The research is obsolete almost immediately after it is completed because of ongoing burials. ”I keep the obituaries from local newspapers to try to keep the files up to date,” Roden said.
In addition to often incomplete early cemetery records, the researchers have to cope with old headstones so badly weathered that they are difficult to read. Placing a piece of paper on the stone and then doing a pencil etching sometimes brings out the engraving, but Roden has an even better method. ”We spray shaving cream on the stone and then use a ruler to level off the excess. What is left in the engraving highlights the letters,” she explained. ”We always carry a bucket when we go out so we can wash it off when we are finished.”
Lake County`s earliest documented burials may be in the Volo Cemetery and the Vernon Cemetery, in Half Day, which both date to 1835, according to Roden. Many cemeteries date to the 1840s and 1850s, and there are military cemeteries at Ft. Sheridan, dating to the 1870s, and at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, dating to 1901.
Many settlers buried family members on their own properties, Roden also noted. Since those deaths occurred before there were municipalities to keep the records, some of those early cemeteries have been lost. Roden remembers a few years ago hearing of one such cemetery, rumored to be on Miller Road in the Lake Zurich area.
”One summer a dozen of us walked up and down that road looking for a cemetery, but we couldn`t find it,” she recalled. A chance conversation with someone she met later at the Lake County Museum gave Roden the clue she needed. She went back out to Miller Road and found the cemetery in the front yard of a home. ”The reason we couldn`t see it was that when the contractor built the house, he laid all the stones down on the ground. The ones we found lying there were all that was left,” she said.
Paddock got the last word on behalf of one of her ancestors, whose passing had gone unmarked, when she made a journey to England a few years ago. After a long search, she located the grave where her great-grandfather was buried but found that his second wife, who had remarried after his death, had chosen not to put his name on their joint headstone. ”I thought that was terrible and I decided I had to do something. I had his name engraved on the headstone, and I even added an epitaph,” Paddock said, with a note of satisfaction. ”It says, `At last I found thee, farewell my friend.”`
