OAK HILL Cemetery Burials
*THESE VETERAN BURIALS FROM THE ROLL OF HONOR MAY BE IN EITHER
THE PALOS PARK OR THE BLUE ISLAND OAK HILL CEMETERY*
This cemetery is #95 or #99 on the 1933 map
If you can add information to this webpage email me from the main page
Acker, Jacob - Civil War Vet
Anderson, Bert - Civil War Vet
Anderson, Dewey - WW I Vet
Anderson, Edward L - WW I Vet
Anderson, Harry W - WW I Vet
Atwood, Raymond A - WW I Vet
Augustus, George - Civil War Vet
Bard, Austin - Civil War Vet
Bentley, C S - Civil War Vet
Bergh, Norman Carlson - WW I Vet
Berry, George W - WW I Vet
Bickerstaff, Samuel - Veteran
Boyd, George - Civil War Vet
Breckenridge, Milton - Civil War Vet
Brom, Gren Victor - WW I Vet
Brown, Hastings - Civil War Vet
Brown, Isaiah - Civil War Vet
Brown, Zacharias - Civil War Vet
Burgstrom, Beda M - WW I Vet
Burhans, William L - Veteran
Burris, Brent - Civil War Vet
Carlson, Alvin Carl - WW I Vet
Cash, John - Civil War Vet
Chadwick, Walter - WW I Vet
Cleveland, James - Civil War Vet
Cline, Robert C Jr - WW I Vet
Collier, Lincoln - Civil War Vet
Collins, Alex Tony - Civil War Vet
Collins, Jordin - Civil War Vet
Cook, J L - Civil War Vet
Cook, John Lewis - Civil War Vet
Cooper, John E - Civil War Vet
Crosby, Luther F - Civil War Vet
Daniels, George - Civil War Vet
Duffy, Edward - WW I Vet
Durland, T E - Civil War Vet
Edmandson, William M - Civil War Vet
Everett, John - Civil War Vet
Everhart, Charles W - Sp. Am. War Vet
Ferguson, Willis H - Civil War Vet
Fish, Francis W - Civil War Vet
Fogg, Charles D - Civil War Vet
Fosnitt, Hiram F - Civil War Vet
Gardner, P G - Civil War Vet
Gassett, Charles - Civil War Vet
Goodwin, H E - Civil War Vet
Gorman, Owen - Civil War Vet
Graham, James C - Civil War Vet
Grundwater, Lane - Civil War Vet
Hall, Edward - Civil War Vet
Hammerstedt, Eric - WW I Vet
Harley, William - Civil War Vet
Hart, Mathias - Civil War Vet
Helgren, Martin - WW I Vet
Hill, Harry - Civil War Vet
Holmquist, Allen J - WW I Vet
Hoover, Rev George K - Civil War Vet
Housel, A C - Civil War Vet[src #41]
Huddleston, James - b. 1 May 1917; d. Oct 1991 - Husband of Florence
Jansson, Robert - b. 15 Aug 1920; d. July 1981 Saugatuck, MI - Husband of Florence[src #56]
Keyes, William - Civil War Vet
Lambert, Arthur T - Civil War Vet
Lewis, David - Civil War Vet
Long, Rodney - Civil War Vet
Lundegard, Alex - WW I Vet
Lyon, D A - Civil War Vet
Manson, Clarence - WW I Vet
Marshall, J A - Civil War Vet
Mccusker, Dan - Civil War Vet
Mcdonald, Jonathan Angus - Veteran
Mcnany, Richard - Veteran
Mctaggart, Jonathan W - WW I Vet
Mitchell, Robert - Civil War Vet
Moore, George - Civil War Vet
Mosby, Hugh - Veteran[src #41]
Nelson, N. Oscar - b. 1993; d. 1964 - Husband of Ellen
Nelson, Ellen - b. 1896; d. 1978 - Wife of N. Oscar - Dau of Lars & Anna Engberg[src #56]
Olson, Andrew M - WW I Vet
Olson, Edurn A - WW I Vet
Orea, Isaac - Civil War Vet
Orendorph, Henry - Civil War Vet
Patterson, Henry - Civil War Vet
Paulson, Frederick - Civil War Vet
Pearson, Oscar - WW I Vet
Phillips, James - Civil War Vet
Reeves, Alvin B - Civil War Vet
Rogers, Joseph - Civil War Vet
Rydstedt, Carl G - Veteran
Sabin, Oscar C - Civil War Vet
Sachison, Charles - WW I Vet
Sams, William - Civil War Vet
Sawyer, Charles - Civil War Vet
Schoenenberger, Walter C - WW I Vet
Scott, Edward J - Veteran
Seiling, Henry - Civil War Vet
Severin, Enoch N - WW I Vet
Sieling, Henry - Veteran
Simpson, Eric - Civil War Vet
Smith, Charley - Civil War Vet
Stewart, Kenneth M - WW I Vet[src #41]
Sundin, Nils G. - b. 11 Apr 1902; d. 28 Sep 1986; Husband of Edith
Sundin, Edith C. - b. 07 Dec 1905; d. 01 Jul 1995; Wife of Nils G.[src #56]
Swanson, Lorentz H - WW I Vet
Sweet, B F - Civil War Vet
Thompson, George A - Civil War Vet
Thraldkill, Major - Civil War Vet
Tompson, George - Civil War Vet
Tony, Alex - Civil War Vet
Walkington, A C - Civil War Vet
Whalen, Charles - Veteran
Woodson, Isaac - Civil War Vet[src #41]
Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois) May 31, 1999
GRAVE MIX-UP FOR AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER
For more than 40 years, the Palos Historical Society has held a Memorial Day program to honor veterans buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Palos Park. A squad from the Veterans of Foreign Wars fires a salute and plays taps, and American flags decorate the graves dotting the 2-acre cemetery.
But few know that among the dead who are honored is an unidentified Civil War soldier buried mistakenly in another soldier's grave. And as the years have passed, the number of people who know the significance and story behind the small blank headstone near the top of the hill is dwindling.
So John Barun, commander of VFW Post 4861 and a scheduled speaker for the Memorial Day ceremony Monday, plans to include a special mention of the unknown soldier.
"It is an unusual story," he said.
And Robert Mahaffay, great-great-grand-nephew of the Union Army private for whom the grave was intended, has passed along records about the incident to the historical society. According to those records, for more than a century an unknown soldier has been lying in the grave of Pvt. William Mahaffay, whose father, Irish immigrant and farmer Samuel Mahaffay was one of the first settlers in what is now Palos Township. William Mahaffay was 18 when he signed up in 1862 to serve in the Civil War, enlisting in Company F of the 100th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Mahaffay's regiment also was known as the Will County Regiment, although many men in Company F were from Palos and Orland Townships, in Cook County.
In August 1862, Mahaffay and other local volunteers gathered at the Mahaffay schoolhouse, near his family's farm. From there the recruits traveled to Joliet to be mustered into service.
Mahaffay played the fife in the band of the 100th brigade. The job was far from cushy, because during battles it was the band members who helped carry their wounded comrades to safety.
During the Civil War, more soldiers died of disease than enemy bullets. The 100th Illinois was no exception. Of the regiment's 214 men who perished during the war, 134 died from disease, according to state records.
Mahaffay was among them, dying of measles in February 1863 at a hospital in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
After the war, Mahaffay's parents paid $100 to have their son's body sent home for reburial at Oak Hill Cemetery, on 131st Street a block east of Southwest Highway.
But when the casket arrived and was opened, Mahaffay's mother, Betsey, refused to believe the body was her son's. For one thing, her son's hair was dark, but that of the soldier lying in the casket was light. Betsey Mahaffay had other reservations, but those were not recorded, Robert Mahaffay said.
Frank Crawford, a retired teacher and Civil War scholar living in Caledonia, Ill., said such mixups were not unusual.
"Dog tags as we know them did not exist," he said. "At the hospital probably nobody knew who this young man, far from home with the measles, was," he said.
Many of the men who died of disease were buried immediately, with no embalming, and decomposition started immediately, he added.
Despite the doubts, the Mahaffays buried the body they had received in the place where they had hoped to lay their son to rest. "Maybe his mother just wanted to believe it was his body," said Robert Mahaffay, who lives in Arlington Heights. They made no effort to return the body or recover the correct one. Decades later, Betsy Mahaffay's misgivings were proved correct. In 1941 a family friend located the grave of a "William Mafay" from Company F of the 100th Illinois in the Stones River National Military Park in Murfreesboro. The family investigated and learned that it was indeed the grave of Pvt. William Mahaffay.
Now Barun, a Civil War buff who has visited several Civil War battlefields, said he would like to see a different headstone for the man buried in William Mahaffay's grave, one that at least shows he is an unknown Union soldier. [Submitted by Src #96]
Sun-Times (Chicago, Illinois) May 28, 2000
Memorials for veterans get their day in the sun
Veterans memorials are afterthoughts, if thought of at all. Pigeons perch on them. Children scamper around them while their parents visit nearby graves. And the sun, wind and rain tear at them without mercy. But on Memorial Day, they come alive with the power to provoke, intrigue and move.
"There is constant dialogue between the past and the present in these memorials," said Ted Karamanski, a Loyola University history professor, memorial buff and author of the book Rally Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War.
What follows is just a sampling of unusual or overlooked memorials or grave sites in the Chicago area: an unknown soldier, a long- delayed tribute and an African-American flying a Confederate flag.
The battered tombstone in a Palos Park cemetery says Civil War veteran William Mahaffay rests beneath the ground.
But the marker is a 137-year-old lie in limestone.
Mahaffay never made it home. Another soldier's corpse was sent in error. His parents buried the wrong body in the grave marked for their boy.
Now a few retired veterans are trying to correct the error with a monument to commemorate the soldier without a name.
Palos Park resident and veteran John Barun started researching the history of William Mahaffay last year, after hearing that a relative had found the man's true burial site in Stones River National Cemetery in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Barun said Mahaffay was born March 4, 1844, to farmer Samuel Mahaffay and his wife, Betsy, who lived near what is now 135th Street and 82nd Avenue.
William Mahaffay enlisted as a young man with Company F of the 100th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. After his parents learned he had died Feb. 8, 1863, in Murfreesboro, they spent $100 to have his body shipped home, which was unusual at the time, Barun said.
"When the casket arrived with the boy, and they opened up the casket, the mother noticed right away that was not her son," he said.
Such mixups were not unusual in those days because soldiers did not have dog tags, said Barun, a Civil War buff.
It's unclear why the family buried the body at Oak Hill Cemetery, which is on 131st Street just east of Southwest Hwy.
Perhaps they thought it was the decent thing to do, or perhaps the mother just wanted to believe it was her son, Barun speculated. Either way, the parents appeared to give up retrieving the body of their son, who the federal government has confirmed is buried in the national cemetery east of Nashville, Barun said.
"It's really a strange story," said Barun, who hopes to raise enough contributions by fall to have a memorial put on the grave site, telling the story of the unknown soldier.
The idea of building a veterans memorial in DuPage County languished for more than a decade and was going nowhere.
DuPage was one of the few counties in the state without a memorial to residents who died fighting for their country.
So when Air Force veteran John Case briefly became DuPage County Board chairman in April 1998, he put the war memorial on the agenda.
"It had just kind of milled around and went nowhere," Case said.
A year later, after receiving $750,000 in state money, the county dedicated one of the more unusual veterans memorials in the area: a large, working sundial that casts a moving shadow, as the day proceeds, across the names of the DuPage war dead engraved on tablets.
The names, about 900, include veterans from the Black Hawk War of 1832 to the Persian Gulf conflict.
The memorial presented a challenge for Hungarian immigrant Eszter Borvendeg, an architect at Wight & Co., the Downers Grove firm that got the design job.
It was the first time Borvendeg had designed a veterans memorial. And after only five years in this country, she had to get a feel for how Americans view war and the memorials.
Borvendeg decided to make no statements on the wars but to focus on the soldiers who sacrificed.
She thought a sundial worked because "the idea is that as we have the sun going up every day, we'll remember them."
She recalls the elderly veterans who gathered at the ceremony last year to dedicate the memorial, which is next to the DuPage County Government Center at 421 N. County Farm Rd. in Wheaton.
"They were crying, and they were just so moved that this county had finally done something," Borvendeg said.
"That was the whole purpose, that one moment."
The late African-American funeral home owner Ernest A. Griffin wasn't trying to be controversial when he began flying a Confederate flag at half-staff at a veterans memorial he had built on his parking lot.
Griffin's career had been spent commemorating the dead, and when he learned that his funeral home at 3232 King Dr. had been on the site of Camp Douglas, a prisoner of war camp where roughly 6,000 Confederate soldiers died from disease, he felt he had to do something about it.
"They were sons of God before they were sons of man, and for that, we recognize all those persons who have passed," said Griffin's son- in-law James O'Neal. "It is not recognition of beliefs of their superiors."
Moreover, the memorial wall and fountain recognize Griffin's grandfather Charles, who not only fought for the Union in the Civil War but also happened to be inducted at Camp Douglas, O'Neal said.
Griffin had long known about his grandfather's military service, but it was only late in Griffin's life that he discovered that the site of his funeral home also happened to be the spot where his grandfather was inducted.
"Unbeknownst to him, when he acquired the property, he was walking in the dust of his grandfather's boots," O'Neal said.
Griffin, who died in 1995 at the age of 83, put up the memorial wall in 1992. It contains miniature flags of all of the states involved in the Civil War, as well as military weapons from that time, in cases.
In the last years of his life, Griffin spoke about his discovery to groups across the country, including Civil War organizations in the South.
His son-in-law accompanied him and saw racial attitudes and prejudices melt as Griffin described what he had done, O'Neal said.
Griffin Funeral Home still gets a lot of visitors each year, from school groups on field trips to Southerners looking for their ancestors in the funeral home's book of the dead from Camp Douglas.
O'Neal remembers one visit from a young man in a van bearing Michigan plates and plastered with Confederate stickers.
When the young man got out to see the memorial, "you could tell he was a little miffed about it being in an integrated community," O'Neal said.
But Griffin showed the young man around and took him inside the funeral home, so the man could find the listing of his ancestor who died at Camp Douglas.
"When that young man left here," O'Neal said, "he left with a smile and a completely different outlook."
[Submitted by Src #96]
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