Burial records come alive
By HERB MARYNELL Courier & Press staff writer 464-7434 or
hmarynel(a)evansville.net
January 31, 2004
Jane Peckinpaugh is struck by the number of children's deaths she is
finding from the 1800s and early 1900s as she goes through Oak Hill
Cemetery burial records to be posted on the Internet.
"There are so many more children's deaths than you would think, so
many children," said Peckinpaugh, appointed this month as
superintendent of the city's two cemeteries.
There are children such as Anna Sanders, a 3-year-old who died in
April 1864 of brain fever, according to handwritten data on the
child's 3-by-5-inch cemetery burial record card.
There are children stillborn or who died from a variety of illnesses
such as spinal meningitis and scarlet fever.
The first person buried at Oak Hill Cemetery was 2-year-old Eleanor
Johnson, listed as Ellen Johnson in the cemetery burial records, who
died in February 1853.
After going though the cemetery records, Peckinpaugh appreciates the
improvements in medicine that have reduced the death rate among
children over the decades.
The city began processing burial records at the Oak Hill and Locust
Hill cemeteries 14 months ago for the Internet.
Peckinpaugh said she and two office workers are adding about 700
names to the Oak Hill database each week.
So far, slightly more than 30,000 of the 67,000 Oak Hill burial
records are on the Internet.
She wants to recruit volunteers from the public and local colleges to
help speed up putting the records on the Internet.
The data often include the person's name, age (in years, months and
days) at death, place of death and sometimes place of birth, burial
site, cause of death, race, social status (married, single, widowed,
child), funeral home, attending physician and other information.
Some records are less complete than others but all available
information goes into the database, Peckinpaugh said.
People with last names beginning with A through F and T through Z are
in the database, she said.
She also would like to find a physician volunteer to provide
additional information on medical terms used in older records.
Ed Ziemer, director of city transportation and services, said two
interns at his office are compiling the burial data at Locust Hill
for the Internet.
More than 5,000 of the 27,000 records are in the system, according to
the cemetery Web site.
However, a cemetery official said a fire in the early 1900s destroyed
Locust Hill burial records from before 1905, and perhaps 35,000 are
actually buried at Locust Hill.
Ziemer and Peckinpaugh expect all data from both cemeteries to be on
the Internet by the end of this year.
The information will be a boon to people interested in genealogy and
tracing family histories, Peckinpaugh said.
Oak Hill Cemetery is at 1400 E. Virginia St. and Locust Hill is at
3800 Kratzville Road.
Oak Hill was the second city-platted public burying ground, replacing
a small graveyard that opened in the 1830s at the edge of what then
was the small village of Evansville.
Oak Hill opened in 1853 and now contains 175 acres. About 120 acres
are platted for burial plots, with 55 acres along Morgan Avenue
available for expanding the cemetery.
Many of the city's noted businessmen and community leaders are buried
at Oak Hill, including mayors and people who served as Indiana's
governor and as U.S. secretary of state.
Oak Hill moved a step closer this week to being placed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
Dennis Au, the city's historic preservation officer, said the Indiana
Historic Preservation review board on Wednesday approved the city's
application to place Oak Hill on the national register.
The application now goes to the historic preservation section of the
National Parks Service for final approval, and a decision should come
in two to four weeks, Au said.
Au said the city has two public cemeteries because Locust Hill, which
opened around the same time as Oak Hill, was the cemetery for
Lamasco, an area bordered by the Ohio River, Pigeon Creek, Maryland
Street and First Avenue that was incorporated as a city in 1837 to
compete with neighboring Evansville.
Lamasco merged into Evansville around 1857.
Tamara's Genealogy Bookstore & Census Copies
http://www.angelfire.com/in4/genealogybooks/