Friday, September 4, 2009

Make that 4 missing gravesites

For those who skipped the last post, I've been trying to figure out what happened to some Bromagem gravesites. Despite having death certificates for four individuals, all with burial information shown, they do not appear in cemetery records when I call to confirm that they are there. I started to worry when I heard that Oakwoods cemetery in Chicago has been wrapped into the current Chicago-area cemetery task force investigations and called to confirm that Mary J Bromagem and her daughter, Lillian Bromagem Stevens, were in fact there. The cemetery office has no record of either of them and in fact, I was told that they have no one "with that [sur]name". Which made me even more nervous after I went to the County Clerk's office to obtain brother, George's death record which stated that he too was buried there. So that brought the count up to three missing burial sites. The other sibling, Eliza/Lida Bromagem Van Wormer, died in 1930, twenty years after the death of her last surviving sibling, Lillian, and was buried at a different cemetery, Fairmount, outside the city limits.

One of the ideas I had was that perhaps Lida's family, her children and grandchildren, may have moved the Bromagems to a cemetery to be with Lida which would explain why none of them remained at Oakwoods even though the death certificates said that was where they were. So I called Fairmount today and they do not have a Lida or Eliza Van Wormer in their records. Now the missing gravesites are up to four and the investigations at Oakwoods continue. I'm just wondering why Oakwoods doesn't have the Bromagems in their records, even if they were moved at a later date. A visit to the cemetery, with the documentation in hand, is becoming even more necessary with the current investigations.

I thought the death certificates for George and Lida would help me figure out what was going on, but they ended up just widening the problem to surround two more people.

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