A Chicago Cemetery Adventure: Seeking John and Borden Scott

This post is, in part, a love letter to the genealogical community. It's also evidence that family historians will take any opportunity to squeeze in a little research!

The author (center) with sisters Lisa Fox (L) and Saundra Shelley (R).

 

During the Great Migration, as millions of Black Americans moved north and west out of the Deep South, my 2x great-grandmother Scoatney (Scott) Cooper remained in Georgia. However, her two younger half-brothers, John William Scott and Sydney Borden Scott, made their way to Chicago in search of better opportunities.  

John found work in Chicago’s hotels and stockyards, quite different from the teaching work he’d briefly done back home in Georgia. Around 1906, he married a woman named Annie, and they remained married until his death in 1934. I’ve found no evidence they had any children.

Borden, bringing degrees from Atlanta Baptist College (now Morehouse) and Meharry Medical College, received additional training at the University of Illinois’ College of Physicians and Surgeons, then worked as a doctor and postal clerk. He passed in 1965. I’ve found no evidence he married or had kids.

Like any dutiful genealogist, I had researched their burial locations and knew that John was interred at Mount Glenwood Cemetery, now Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens – South, while Borden was at Burr Oak Cemetery. But when I began dreaming of, and then actually planning, a cross-country train vacation whose route began in Chicago, I dug a little deeper and reached out to each cemetery to find out the brothers’ actual sections, plots, and grave numbers. Then, I made sure that I had enough time in Chicago to visit them.

A Plea for Help

There were only two challenges:

1. I didn’t have transportation. It didn’t make sense to rent a car for the short amount of time I was going to be in the city, and taking a rideshare would have meant I was dropped off at the cemetery entrance and then been on foot to find their graves, in cemeteries that were rather large. Even if I’d been fine with that…  
2. I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of wandering around cemeteries of unknown upkeep in an unfamiliar city by myself.

I needed a cemetery buddy.

Now, one of my best friends from college lives in Chicago, but I wasn’t going to ask her to take a day off of work to shepherd me around to cemeteries. That is not her thing. But, you know whose thing that is? Genealogists.

So, what did I do? I reached out to the Chicago chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society with a request for help. I explained my situation and asked if there was anyone in their membership who might be willing to help. I explained who I was – museum educator, genealogist, former officer and member of my local African American genealogical group, author of this blog – so they’d be able to vet me if they wanted to before responding. Finally, I offered lunch and gas money, as a thank you.

And, because the genealogy world is full of helpers, I received a response in less than a day! Lisa Fox and Saundra Shelley were a pair of sisters who, in a demonstration of just how small the world – and especially the Black genealogical community – is, I’d actually met before when a Black lineage society that they are members of (the Society of First African Families of English America) held their annual conference at my museum! They rejected my offer of gas money, asked questions about where my great-uncles had lived and worked in Chicago, told me what was and wasn’t still around for exploration, and made a plan to meet me in my ancestors’ neighborhood to start our day together. Why were they so enthusiastic to help? Because someone had done something similar for them on a research trip they’d taken a few years earlier. They wanted to pay it forward.

Cemetery Searching

On the designated morning, I hopped in an Uber and met Lisa and Saundra at the Metropolitan Community Church, located in the neighborhood where both Borden and John had lived. (In fact, John had lived on a different block of the same street the church is located on.) They drove me around the neighborhood a bit so that I could get some sense of what it had looked like back in the Scott brothers’ day; while there’s certainly been change over time, a number of the old buildings still stand. Then, we set out for the cemeteries.

Stop 1: Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens – South, located in Glenwood, IL, about thirty minutes and 23 miles south of the church.

Our first stop was the cemetery office, where I received a map of the section where John William Scott was buried. I repeated a question I previously asked over email: Did his gravesite have a headstone? Unfortunately, they didn’t know; the records from almost a century ago aren’t the easiest to navigate and don’t have much info. (They declined to let me look at the book.) I also asked if his wife was buried with him, but they responded that their system is not set up to be able to easily answer that.

One thing became clear as we drove through the cemetery to John’s section: there were no vertical headstones. And as we got out of the car, it became clear that for the flat markers that did exist, many (at least where we were) were grown over, or covered with debris. (Yet it’s clear the cemetery had groundskeepers – they were actively at work during our visit, and one became a true hero in this story.) 

We had our work cut out for us.

So, using the marked map – a photocopy of a photocopy, and rather difficult to read, but which had been highlighted for the lot we were seeking – we began our search. And we searched. And we searched. We swept debris off of grave markers to read names and dates, we called possibilities out to each other, we double-checked our location relative to the other sections. And then we asked for help. Lisa went in search of a groundskeeper, and bless him, he jumped right in to help. He discovered that the highlighted section was actually not the correct one, and then began calling into the office to confirm the locations of visible gravestones so that we could triangulate where we were and where we needed to be.

After about 6 location checks, he found someone in the same plot as John! And because he knew the layout of the plots, he used that person to identify the exact location of John’s grave. It was, indeed, unmarked.

The closest marked graves to John William Scott's.

John's gravesite, roughly, marked by a tool from my cemetery buddy's car.

After saying a few words of greeting to my 2x great-granduncle, I began taking photos of his burial location, using a tool from my host’s car to mark his location. I photographed the headstones of the people buried closest to him, and also noted (probably imperfectly, as this part was new for me) the GPS coordinates for his location. Hopefully, this will make it easier for the next people in my family who want to find him.

Then, with *many* words of thanks to the groundskeeper, and a hello to the staffer who initially responded to my email, we headed to our next location.

 

Stop 2: Burr Oak Cemetery, in Alsip, IL, about 14 miles away from Mount Glenwood, and about 16 miles southwest of our starting point at the church.

This was a much easier experience. When I came in and requested a map, they confirmed the name of the person we were looking for – Sydney Borden Scott, buried under the name Borden, as he seemed to have preferred being called in life – and then printed out a crisp map of the section he was buried in that included a photo of his gravestone in the bottom right corner. And despite the size of the cemetery, I actually could have walked to his gravesite from the entrance. But we had a car, so we drove!

All that was left to do was actually find him, using the painted sticks marking lots to hone in on the correct location. Now, not every lot was marked, and I’m sure I didn’t fulling understand the ordering, but I found Borden in less than 5 minutes. I hadn’t told them what day I was planning to visit, but his marker was visible and pretty clear of debris. And many kudos to them, because when I initially reached out to confirm his burial, they followed up not long after to tell me that they had raised his stone back to level (if you’ve ever visited a cemetery, you know gravestones of any type often sink or tilt). I’m grateful they did that.

 

(BTW, I did ask both via email and in person if their records showed who paid for Borden’s burial, as he passed much later than his brother did, never married, and I don’t know what happened to his sister-in-law after John died. However, they reported that the paper records that would have provided this information no longer exist. Maybe I’ll stumble across them in an archive one day…)

So, again, I greeted my great-great-granduncle, and then proceeded to take a few photographs to remember this trip.

Before we left the cemetery, we made two other stops. If you’re familiar with the history of the Civil Rights Movement, you’ve heard the name Emmett Till. If you haven’t, look him – and his mother Mamie – up now. Both are buried in Burr Oak Cemetery. Mamie’s grave is at the front of the cemetery, near the office. Emmett’s grave, clearly a place of pilgrimage for many, is further back. 

Mamie Till's tomb at Burr Oak Cemetery

Emmett Till's gravesite at Burr Oak Cemetery.

We reflected on the moment and their legacy, and departed.

We wrapped up our time together over lunch, where we talked about our genealogical journeys and the literal journey I was about to embark upon by train. Then, in a final moment of kindness and excitement for what their city had to offer, they dropped me off at the Obama Presidential Center, where I took a few photos and wandered the gardens before heading off to my next stop.

What a day! And what a lovely demonstration of the kindness and community that can exist within the genealogical world. I’m so grateful to Lisa and Saundra for their willingness to be my cemetery buddies, and for how they went above and beyond to provide me with more context for John and Borden’s Chicago worlds. I hope my past volunteer work has helped other family historians out, and I look forward to continuing to pay the generosity of those who came before me and who directly help me forward as well.