Burr Oak Cemetery Cook County Illinois Online

Burr Oak Cemetery where 300 graves were illegally disinterred and the plots resold, has now been placed online by the Cook County Sheriff's Office. Families can now browse the photographs of headstones and also search for an ancestor's name in the database search engine

As well, the entire Cemetery database in cvs format has been placed online for those interested to download. This file can opened by most spreadsheet programs. I used Excel to view it.

There are some problems with the database. Genealogists will discover that some names and dates in the photos are not the same as the names and dates in the database. But this is a very small hiccup because you can check the online Cook County Death Indexes for verification, or census records (I use Ancestry.com for my census searches)

We must remember that it was not genealogists who created the database, it was the Cook County Sheriff's office. They compiled this database in record time and relatives and descendants will find it very useful, even with the discrepancies.

... Read more about the tragedy at Burr Oak Cemetery

Burr Oak Cemetery Opening Online Records Database

Authorities plan to give the public access to a searchable online database of nearly 100,000 graves at the historic black cemetery where four people are accused of digging up graves to resell the plots.

The database may be available later this week according to Cook County Sheriff's office. The database was created using existing records from Burr Oak Cemetery and county death certificates.

Burr Oak is the burial place of civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till and several other prominent African-Americans. I

Read the rest of the story Burr Oak Cemetery Opening Online Records Database