Chester Cemetery (aka Ainsworth Cemetery)

Chester Cemetery Names, Dates, Notes

I call it a draft, but that's probably as good as it's going to get. The last two days have been discouraging.

Someone did a marvelous job of transcribing all the names from the gravestones in Chester Cemetery, and that list can be found here thanks to the North West Indiana Genealogical Society.

I say "marvelous" because, in the cemetery yesterday, I truly marveled that anyone could have gotten all those names from those worn, weathered, broken stones. But the site says the list was updated in 1992, so I'm guessing it was created even earlier, when the stones may have been in better shape.

The list on the NWIGS site gives only names. I wanted to fill it out with dates of birth and death, ages, and any other information that the gravestone inscriptions might convey. I have done that to the best of my ability, to the great strain of my eyes, through much crouching on the ground, squinting, swearing, and crawling into lilac hedges, and I still have lots of blanks and question marks in the list. I further supplemented it with any information I could glean from the newspaper archives or other sites, which was precious darn little.

* * *Tuesday my sister and Gothic Grandniece came over and we took a trip to Hobart Cemetery. We showed Grandniece the grave of the boy who had been killed by lightning (I had shown my sister the newspaper article about Arnold Ream). We also pointed out all the children's and babies' graves we came across. As we were walking back to the car, Grandniece said, "That was fun!"