The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) National Society has announced that it has placed its Genealogical Research System online, freely available at: http://dar.org/natsociety/pi_lookup.cfm This site allows you to look up proven patriots and replaces the DAR's previous Patriot Index lookup service. However, each line's most recent three generations are blocked on this public site. This means that you can find proven patriots but may have some challenges determining how closely related you are to them.

In order to see the most recent three generations, you need to contact a DAR member or chapter leader. Christina Bannon, Registrar of the Chicago DAR chapter, offers these enhanced lookups, as well as advice on the application process, in the Newberry's general reading room once a month. She will next be at the Newberry on Friday, December 11, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. No reservations are required.

Pamela Bannos doesn't look like a gravedigger. The slim brunette has been teaching photography at Northwestern University for 17 years. But she did heavy lifting for 15 months to uncover the real story of Chicago's City Cemetery.

I attended Bannos's lecture in September at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. It might seem like an odd venue for a history presentation, until you hear her thesis that 10,000 to 12,000 bodies lie beneath the leafy streets of the Gold Coast and the green fields of Lincoln Park.

As a photographer, Bannos is interested in the back stories of old photos, showing there is more than meets the eye. Her first foray involved an 1898 glass negative of a New York City intersection she had purchased on eBay. She learned genealogical techniques to research all the buildings shown in the photo, such as finding articles from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times database (also available at the Newberry). Northwestern gave her a grant to put up a web site with her findings.

She approached the story of the Chicago City Cemetery as an art project, appreciating the original documents she found for their visual beauty as well as their evidence. The project has two components: an onsite installation in Lincoln Park of six historical markers (two have since been stolen), and a web site called Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park (http://hiddentruths.northwestern.edu).

The web site has 120 pages of primary source documents. Bannos logged many miles traveling to Graceland Cemetery, Chicago Title xamp; Trust, the Illinois Regional Archives at Northeastern Illinois University, the archives of the Chicago Park District, the Illinois State Archives in Springfield, and many more. To see these precious pre-Fire documents is wonderful.

By analyzing disinterment and reinterment records, Bannos feels that thousands of bodies were left behind after the City Cemetery grounds were supposedly cleared. Then it became a case of "out of sight, out of mind". The Couch mausoleum in Lincoln Park became the only visible reminder that a cemetery had existed. Even A. T. Andreas got it wrong in his seminal 1885 History of Chicago. He thought the so-called Milliman Tract, a disputed portion of the City Cemetery, was the entire cemetery. If you look at the maps on the web site, you'll see how vast an area (50 acres) was used for the dead. The City Cemetery had a potter's field and a section for victims of infectious diseases. South of North Avenue was the Catholic Cemetery, and the first Jewish cemetery was also in the area.

Reminders of our early neighbors continue to surface when foundations are dug or sewer lines laid. An interactive map plots the locations and dates of bones, coffins and other materials found.

Spend some time exploring Hidden Truths. The information on 19^th century funeral customs, even grave robbing by medical students, creates context no matter where your ancestors came from.

I salute Pamela Bannos and the incredible amount of work she has done. Now we need another person to step up and do the same for the poor souls buried on the grounds of the Chicago State Hospital in Dunning.

The village hall is located at 11270 Wadsworth Road, Beach Park. For more information contact the Zion Genealogy Society.

Matt Rutherford, Newberry Curator of Genealogy and Local History, will present on nonpopulation census schedules and introduction to research at the Newberry.

The workshop will be held at the Round Lake Beach Cultural and Civic Center, 2007 Civic Center Way, Round Lake Beach. For a printable brochure and application, click here.

Now that a month has passed since the implementation of new reading room hours on Saturday, it seems a good time to say thank you for your cooperation. As a reminder, we are still open Tuesday-Friday from 9-5 and from 9-1 on Saturdays. For more information on visiting the Newberry, visit this page.

In addition to making these records more accessible, Footnote.com is allowing its members to add their own contributions. Users can:

* Add comments or stories about a person
* Upload and attach photos or documents related to that person
* Generate a Footnote Page for any individual that features stories, a photo gallery, timeline and map
* Identify relatives found in the census by clicking the "I'm Related" button

For more details, check out the Footnote Blog. Footnote.com is a subscription database available at the Newberry Library.