Lots of History in Those Cemeteries: Jack the Ripper in Illinois?

From the Dec. 10, 2008, Chicago Tribune "Cemeteries yield family history" by Jeff Long.

Genealogist Craig Pfannkuche likes exploring cemeteries "and digging up arcane facts about the dead."

He feels nostalgic, he said, for the time when cemeteries were like parks, with people bringing a picnic lunch and having family get-togethers-- even if some of the relatives were 6 feet under. Those days lasted from the late 1800s until about 1950."

Victorians loved mourning but that all changed with all the death during World War II.

A favorite of his to visit is McHenry County's Ridgefield Cemetery which opened in 1836, the second-oldest one in the county. There is one gravestone reading "David Hartman, Company B, 36th Regiment of Illinois Volunteers. Killed at Franklin, Tenn. Nov. 30, 1864. Aged 25 years." That provides the groundwork for a lot of interesting further research.

Then there is a real interesting one in the Garden Prairie, Illinois, cemetery reading, "Killed by his wife and Dr. Cream." There are some who believe that Neil Cream, born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1850 and who lived for awhile in Chicago, was Jack the Ripper.

All Sorts of Interesting Stuff in Those Cemeteries. --DaCoot