Read and copyright© by Gloria Dettleff and Dorothy Falk Sep 2001
Originally read by Carmella Kranz and Penny Lemons in Spring 1998.
Previous publications of this cemetery included burials that are in the St. George Cemetery.
The following is from the: "New Baden Centennial, booklet (1855 - 1955)", page 35, under CEMETERY ASSOCIATION.
On August 28, 1893, the village bought land from Anton GRIESBAUM for the sum of $200 for a city cemetery. The town took care of the cemetery and received revenue from it. Ditches were dug, a fence built and painted to enclose it, and a Cemetery Record purchased in 1894. Graves were sold for $1.00 and lots for $8.00 at this time.
On January 30, 1905, a charter was granted by the State of Illinois to the New Baden Cemetery Association. The charter members were: Mrs. Laura METZEL, Mrs. Ida HERTENSTEIN, Mrs. Selma ITEN, Louise MONKEN, Mrs. Christina SCHMIDT, Mrs. Emma JONAS, Miss Emma F. HERTENSTEIN, secretary.
On April 24, 1905, the village deeded the cemetery to the Association, which serves the community and now has charge of Green Mount cemetery as well. This new cemetery is located on the old Trenton Road on the east side of the future Capitol Highway, about one mile north of New Baden. The officers in 1955 were: Mrs. Catherine FREIDERICH, president; Mrs. John BAEHR, secretary, and Mrs. Minnie STOECKEL, treasurer.
This Association is no longer in operation. Land was deeded back to the City but the City Clerk does not have records for this older Cemetery. The City Clerk does have records for the Green Mount Cemetery.
The cemetery is in the middle of town and is colocated with the old Griesbaum Cemetery and the St. George Catholic Cemetery. For the purposes of this listing, we started with Row and Grave # 1 at the northeast corner of the cemetery. This cemetery begins after the first grassy walk way which is to the west of the statue. The northern boundary of this cemetery is the walkway which is about even with the water pump.
This is a recording of what we read from the stones plus data from several other sources - see below. Many of the tombstones are severely weathered away and some have been removed in pieces. The fence has also been removed. We transcribed the stones as they are engraved, even though family members have different spellings of the surnames.
The State of Illinois recommended that County Clerks begin to keep track of the deaths/burials in 1878 and some, but not all, were recorded. When the law became stricter in 1916, more of the deaths were recorded. The death registers (Reg) identified some people that were buried in this cemetery, and some that just said they were buried in New Baden. If no stone was found in either this or the church location, those names were added to both listings since we don't know which one is correct.
There was a listing of the people that were killed in the 1898 cyclone, but no burial information was given. Again, we included these people in both cemetery listings, too, if there was no other family members in either listing. We do not even know that these people were buried in New Baden. It's up to the researcher to decide if this is accurate.
We had access to some burial permits and some death certificates for some of the years. We have added data from those to what we found on the stones and marked it with a *.
The Veteran's tombstones are annotated as either Private Head Stones (PHS) or Government Head Stones (GHS).
The abbreviation S/w means Shares stone with. Unknown means there is some piece of stone remaining there, but nothing to indicate a name. If you know that one of your ancestors was buried here, please Contact Us and we'll add the name to this listing with you as the source.
We also made an unofficial plat of the cemetery. We measured the cemetery to document an approximate placing of the stones listed in the cemetery listing. Some of the stones did not follow a row, so we used our imagination a little. Our purpose in preparing this was to perhaps show families and in-laws that are buried together and how many unmarked graves are between the identified ones.
The names that we got from the death records, death certificates and burial permits that do not have stones are not included on this plat. Those represent an increase of 14% of the names that we do have identified. Additional transcribing of the death registers might yield more names later.
Some of the 8-person plots have the cemetery plot numbers, as recorded by the New Baden City Hall plat, shown.