There had always been rumors about an old pioneer cemetery atop a tiny hill on Walnut Street in Joliet, where the remains of Civil War veterans and some of the city’s earliest settlers were thought to have been buried beneath almost two centuries of dirt.
But since no records were known to exist, and the grassy patch near Walnut and Cass Streets had no grave markers, nobody knew for sure until city workers began digging into the soil last year to lay sewer line. That’s when they made a remarkable discovery.
Three feet below the surface, workers found a gleaming white marble gravestone for a baby girl who died months before her 2nd birthday in 1852. The child’s name “Jenete” was etched in block letters across the top.
The mystery piqued the interest of Gina Wysocki, an author and expert on 19th Century grave sites like this one. In peeling back the layers of the little girl’s past, Wysocki made another extraordinary find: Living [collateral] descendants of Baby “Jenete” in Iowa not only knew of her brief life, but had been searching for her burial site for decades.
Read the full article by Joel Hood about Baby Jenette in the June 7, 2009 edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Thanks to Sandra Bulthuis for alerting me to the article.
