History
Germantown Township was the earliest German settlement in Clinton County, about 1834. For more information, see Germantown Township from the 1881 History of Marion & Clinton Counties, Illinois.
St. Boniface was the earliest Catholic Church in Clinton County. Their first church dates to 1837. The first St. Boniface cemetery was closer to the church. Most of the bodies were moved to the new cemetery except for the 5 people that had died from cholera. The stones moved from the eariliest cemetery are in Section 3c near the cross.
This cemetery has probably also been informally called the Germantown Cemetery and the Hanover Cemetery. It is a block south of the St. Boniface Church and can be seen from Route 161 at the southwestern edge of Germantown. This cemetery is still active, burials are still being made here.
Notes and Section Descriptions
There is a plat of the cemetery, but we did not see it while creating this listing. We created this Unofficial Map
We have labeled the Rows and Graves as a help for you to locate the grave physically. Our Row and Grave numbers will not agree with any record that you might have from a previous Church or legal record. We started the numbering of rows and graves in each of our sections by facing the writing on the stones, and then called the first grave space on the left side of the first row as Row 1, Grave 1. Sections 5 & 6 begin at the last row, at the left, since new burials will be made in the front rows. Section 1a begins on the right side because there are so few stones remaining on the left.
We reported spellings the way they appeared. Some names are spelled one way in the church record and another way on the tombstone, especially when Americanizing the names. Names may also vary as to which is their first name and which is the middle name. The days of death may vary a day or more between the church record and stone, especially if someone "died last night". The years might be off when people tried to remember just when the death occurred when they purchased a stone several years later.
Church burial records, 1839 to 1956, written in Latin, were microfilmed and, thanks to many volunteers, are available our website at St. Dominic Catholic Church Death Records.
Sections 1, 1a, & 1c
Sections 1 and 1a contain the earliest burials beginning in the 1830s. Readable stones remain on only a small percentage of the graves in these Sections. If you can't find your ancestors and everything leads to them living in Germantown, it is possible they were buried in Section 1 or 1a with wooden crosses which have long since deteriorated. The grave numbers in these sections merely represent the number of the stones still remaining; there could be dozens of unidentified burials between one number and the next. People were buried in chronological order of death to conserve ground space in accordance with German tradition. We divided Section 1 into 1 and 1a just to make it a bit easier for the researcher to find a grave. The stones in Sections 1 and 1a face in opposite directions. Section 1c is just a small area where the stones are spaced differently.
Sections 2 & 3
Sections 2 & 3 continued the practice of burying people chronologically as they died. The majority of people buried here do have stones similar in style to each other. In many cases, we were able to find possible names from the church burial records to fill in some of the spaces that have no stones, we have marked those as "possibly buried here".
Section 4
Section 4 is family plots in groups of 4, 6, or 8 graves. Some of the plots are probably empty. There are some stones with "Privacy" information for people still living, available on a need-to-know basis, just ask any of the people who worked on this version for additional information from the stone. The row numbers are not perfect, but will get you close.
Sections 5 & 6
Sections 5 & 6, the two active sections, generally have lots sized for one or two people. Again, additional "Privacy" information on those stones might be available about people still living, see above paragraph.