POINTers In Person Chicago-North QUEEN OF HEAVEN KIOSK

CATHOLIC CEMETERY

BURIALS

By Daniel E. Niemiec

(Revised November 2005)

If you have Chicago ancestors or relatives who have shuttled off this mortal coil, it is often difficult to find out which cemetery they are buried in. You need either a death certificate (expensive), a death notice (elusive or non-existent), an old auntie who knows (but won't tell you) or you have to call many cemeteries, one-at-a-time (time-consuming). Experienced Chicago researchers can usually narrow down the cemetery based on the religion and ethnic origin of the deceased, but it can still be difficult to find. Even if you find the right cemetery, you need the Section, Block and Lot numbers, or the Crypt number, which requires a call to the cemetery office anyway. THEN you need help locating the grave itself and you have to stop into the office for assistance.

There is a tool available to Chicago genealogists that can help you find the burial locations of your Catholic relatives without going through the afore-mentioned steps. I will give you the bad news now just to get it out of the way.

1) This tool is only available at the major Cook and Lake county cemeteries. The ones that do not have offices do not have a kiosk.

2) The tool is incomplete because not all cemetery data has been entered yet.

3) It only contains Catholic Cemetery interments and entombments.

Most of the kiosk contain data for all Cook and Lake county Catholic cemeteries. Until recently, only All Saints and Queen of Heaven had kiosk with all the data. Some of the indoor mausoleums have a kiosk too and this is helpful if you need to use it when the cemetery office is closed on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. As of November 2005, the following cemeteries have a kiosk that contains ALL the Catholic cemetery interment data for Cook and Lake Counties:

All Saints – Des Plaines

Ascencion – Libertyville

Good Shepherd – Orland Park

Holy Cross – Calumet City

Queen of Heaven – Hillside

Resurrection - Justice

St. Michael the Archangel – Palatine

So now that you know what is available, how does it work? Is it difficult to use? Well a little.

The computer kiosk is a touch screen (no keyboard) so you touch the screen and a voice starts explaining that you should type in the last name. The voice is comforting the first 2 or 3 times you hear it, but after the 300th name, you begin hearing this precious voice in your sleep. Anyway, you can only type in a last name using the touchscreen keyboard (arranged in rows A-Z...you can change this to the standard QWERTY keyboard layout by touching a button on the screen). The computer will then take you to a full-screen list starting with the name closest to what you typed, even if you don't get an exact match. The list is in column form (looks a little like a spreadsheet) and shows you the last name, first name, date of interment (not date of death) and age. One of the rows will be highlighted and you need to move the highlight to the name you want. (The "voice" starts instructing you again.) The touch-screen gives you a Scroll Up and a Scroll Down button but no Page Up or Page Down, so if you are looking for Marie Burke, you will either have to tap the Scroll Down button about a thousand times, or you can press and HOLD the Scroll Down or Scroll Up buttons to move quickly through the list. Once you find the entry you want, press the button marked Show Record. This takes you to a new screen which just shows a single record, including the name, the burial location (Section Block Lot and Grave numbers or Crypt and Tier numbers for mausoleums) and the cemetery name and address. (Note that the date of interment and age are not on the second screen so you need to write them down while still on the first screen.) You now have 3 choices. (The "voice" gives you more instructions.) You can press Start Over, you can Go Back to the first screen with the list, or you can push a button to Print the record. A printout will come out of the printer down below. The printout gives you a full sheet containing the standard cemetery rules and regs on one side, and on the other side you get the name and burial location, cemetery name and address, a map showing the entire cemetery and the winding roads and section numbers AND a new feature... a map of the Section showing block numbers and very tiny lot numbers!

I should point out that A) not all sections are in the computer yet; B) The section maps are very very hard to read because they have many lines and numbers mixed together. I have sent Catholic Cemeteries some suggestions, such as the section map, and whether I had anything to do with it or not, some of the suggestions are being implemented. The section maps are critical because you can find the grave yourself without having to rely on a visit to the office (sometimes closed) or looking at those little round markers that tell you where you are (often missing or unreadable).

I have been finding possible relatives in the Social Security Death index but many of them have no full date of death (just the month and year) so it is nice to be able to use the cemetery kiosk to find the date of burial, which usually gets you within a few days of the date of death. If you have narrowed the date of death to a few days, you can now search for a death notice and get the rest of the family structure. I also like being able to look these up without calling and bothering the cemetery office staff. I have so many names I'm looking for that I would never stop calling them and they would finally put in a caller-id and block my calls.

I have been told by the head of Catholic Cemeteries computer projects that this database will NEVER be posted on the internet. They have yet to give a plausible explanation why. In any case, the fact that they are spending years of effort to create this database for us should be appreciated and utilized by every Chicago genealogist.