YOUNGSTOWN Tracing deaths, studying lives

The author won a state award in 1999 for his book about area Jewish cemeteries.
By TRACEY D'ASTOLFO
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
YOUNGSTOWN -- Louis Joseph's painstaking work sheds more light on life and death in the Mahoning Valley.
Joseph says he has read more than 27,000 headstones at Calvary Cemetery, the oldest Catholic cemetery in the city.
The Mahoning County chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, of which Joseph is a member, has used the information to publish the first volume of "Mount Calvary Cemetery," a history of the cemetery and a record of the burials there.
Joseph also verified over 60,000 burials, 6,000 of which are included in the first volume. A total of eight volumes will eventually be published.
It took Joseph seven years to compile death and burial information from tombstones at Calvary, cemetery records and city records.
The 332-page first volume of "Calvary Cemetery" has recently been published and contains records for burials that took place in the oldest parts of the cemetery. Joseph said the next seven volumes will include information on the other sections of the cemetery.
Learned much
Joseph said he learned a lot during his research.
"You see the average life span increase, you see children dying every day and then slowing down to once a week in the 1930s. You see a whole family die of diphtheria," he explained. "You watch immigration -- all Irish in the beginning, then the Italians came, then Eastern Europeans, then Spanish. You can watch the names change."
Joseph, a Catholic, said his work at the cemetery gave him a better understanding of life and death and how quickly life passes.
"The good old days weren't as good as everyone remembers," he said.
Jewish cemeteries
Joseph, who donates his time, previously compiled a book for the society comprising the history and tombstone inscriptions of the area's Jewish cemeteries. The book won the Ohio Genealogical Society's Simon Kenton Award in 1999 for transcription of Ohio records.
Joseph said he offered to do this work because he realizes how difficult it is to find the graves of people who died long ago. He and his wife, Sarah, originally joined the society while trying to find the burial site of her great-grandmother, who died in 1904.
Joseph said he also undertook the task because he likes challenges, and because he had a lot of free time.
"Back then I had two kids in college and no money to go anywhere or do anything," he said with a laugh.
The monumental task of recording the burials was compounded by the fact that the graves are not arranged in rows, Joseph said. After developing a system to ensure no graves were skipped over, Joseph began the work of finding accurate information on each burial.
He said the book includes any information he could find on the burials that would be genealogically pertinent, such as the person's name, birth year and any other dates, family members, where the person was born and whether or not the person died in Youngstown.
Any information that is questionable is noted in the book. The beginning of the book includes the history of Calvary Cemetery and cemeteries in general and copies of newspaper articles pertaining to the cemetery.
Joseph said many of the graves had no markers, so to ensure that no burial was missed he transcribed records from the cemetery's registry books, which include information such as name, age, date, address and cause of death; and lot records, which detail where each person is buried. He said all headstones were rechecked at least once to ensure accuracy, and information on broken headstones was recorded if it was at all discernible.
Hard to find
Sometimes, he said, it was practically impossible to find information on a burial. For example, the original Catholic cemetery, Rose Hill Cemetery, used to be on Wilson Avenue, where St. Steven's of Hungary Church now sits.
The cemetery was dug up and moved to Calvary on the city's West Side between 1885 and 1898, upon the order of the bishop, who wanted one large cemetery as opposed to several smaller cemeteries.
The cemetery originally accepted only Catholics for burial, but now accepts non-Catholics with permission from a priest.
Joseph said there are no records of the burials in Rose Hill Cemetery, and even attempts to match names on tombstones to county records were often unsuccessful.
"The county death records aren't complete, because you didn't have to register a death back then, they didn't have death certificates. People were buried privately, unlike today. If a person felt like going to the courthouse, they did," said Joseph.
Joseph also found headstones where people had inscribed names of relatives who weren't buried there, as a remembrance. Other headstones did not include the first name or maiden name of a deceased woman.
No rules
At that time people could engrave whatever they wished on headstones -- there were no rules.
"Back then, they looked at death differently than we do," said Joseph. "It was part of life, it was something they lived with. Who back then would have thought that anybody was going to come looking for them?"
Joseph's work, which averaged out to between 1,500 and 2,000 hours a year, included painstaking examinations of cemetery record books, which were 125 years old and hand-written. His wife did much of the work of deciphering the fancy, often overlapping handwriting.
Sometimes the names of the deceased, but not the location of the grave, were recorded. Often names were spelled differently in records than on tombstones, perhaps because the cemetery secretary at the time may not have been able to understand the broken English of an immigrant.
"I have learned one thing: Just because it's written in granite doesn't mean it's true," said Joseph.
Joseph has included a section in the book to address these unsolved mysteries.
Joseph still has the job of preparing the information for the remaining seven volumes for publishing, which involves entering the information in the computer, printing it out and then re-checking each entry against the headstones.
Joseph, who works for Youngstown's water department, estimates the next volume will be ready for publishing in mid-2004.
Joseph said proceeds from the sale of soft-cover copies of the book will be used to fund the printing of subsequent volumes.
The Genealogical Society will donate hardcover copies of the book to Calvary Cemetery, the Youngstown Public Library, the Mahoning Valley Historical Society and the Youngstown Center of Industry and Labor. His next project is a book on Oak Hill Cemetery.
XFor more information or a copy of the book, contact the Mahoning County Chapter of The Ohio Genealogical Society at P.O. Box 9333, Youngstown, 44513; or e-mail mccogs@hotmail.com.