Cemeteries of Boone County
Supplied by Illinois State Genealogical Society Cemetery Location Project
In the late 1970s⁄early 1980s, the ISGS Cemetery Location project was started at the encouragement of the Illinois State Archives. Some information, although not uniform, was obtained from local county genealogy and historical societies, which was input into a database and was made available to researchers at the Illinois State Archives.
A few years ago, Illinois State Genealogical Society volunteers rediscovered this old database (which was on disk) and were able to recover most of the information, putting it on the Internet for all to use. A little over half of the counties were represented and all with various detail and none of it up-to-date.
In 1999, Project Coordinator Joan Lund began to build the missing counties using “Honor Rolls, State of Illinois Veterans Commission” and the U.S. Geographical Survey web site. Here one can locate some but not all of the cemeteries in a county (cemeteries that are less then 50' squared are not reflected in the database, nor are they on actual USGS maps). Lund then cross-checked cemetery locations using USGS maps and an Illinois Department of Transportation map for each county, filling in the section numbers and, where obvious, the quarter section numbers.
It is Lund’s plan to turn this database, which now contains some 15,000 entries, into a searchable database soon. Currently, if someone has the name of an Illinois cemetery but has no idea where it might be located, he⁄she may write Lund, who will search her database. About half of the counties are missing those small cemeteries that are less than 50' squared. To contact Joan Lund, Cemetery Location Coordinator, e-mail her at: j-lund@uiuc.edu.