Burr Oak has been serving the Chicago community since 1923. During the Sheriff’s investigation, a database was compiled of the individuals buried at Burr Oak, which was built from the Cemetery’s records. Burr Oak’s records consist of manual and computer records in the following forms:

• File cards for each burial containing the name of the deceased, date of death, age, and location of the grave. These cards were maintained alphabetically by last name.
• Record books by cemetery area showing the burials by lot and section. These books were maintained manually.
• Record books of burials by date which were maintained manually.
• Since 2001, computerized data records of burials containing the name of the deceased, date of death, age, location of the grave and other information.

It is unknown whether all of Burr Oak’s existing records were captured by the Sheriff, or if some records were destroyed or missing over the years and therefore not available to be captured.

The edited database represents the best efforts of all involved to provide as accurate a database as possible. Many records required interpretation of the information in order to make the appropriate matches and related edits. An example of data that required interpretation was the spelling or abbreviation of the cemetery section. This information could vary greatly depending upon the individual who originally recorded the information. Another example of data requiring interpretation involved the matching of records where most but not all fields agreed with another record. This was necessary to eliminate duplicate records.

The majority of the edited records include complete information for an individual, including first and last name, date of burial, age, and grave location. However, there are an estimated 10,000 records of individuals buried at Burr Oak (out of over 140,000) that have incomplete information, particularly on grave location, which will need to be researched in the future. It is possible that the information contained in the computer records is all there is and that no additional information will be found to complete the record.

The Sheriff also built a database of photos of substantially all of the headstones at the Cemetery. The Sheriff built a Web Site with this information for the public to access. This database can be accessed at www.burroak.net. It contains approximately 43,000 photos of headstones at the Cemetery.

The headstone database has been incorporated with the burial database. When searching for an individual grave site, if a headstone exists, a photo of the headstone along with the grave location will be shown.