Couple hunts down graves of Civil War vets

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Couple hunts down graves of Civil War vets




By Olivia Cobiskey - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Dec 27, 2007 5:40:55 EST

AMBOY, Ill. — Patrick DeGeorge and Katie Thome have braved 7-foot snow drifts and freezing rain to find the gravestones of Civil War veterans.
“It’s easy to know the stories of General Lee or General Grant, but they’re not the ones who fought the war,” said DeGeorge, 27, of Amboy. “So, we’re trying to find the stories of the grunts.”
“The normal guys who weren’t so normal,” added Thome, his fiancee.
It has become their obsession, not only to solve the mystery of who these people were but also to honor them now that they’re gone by replacing or repairing their tombstones.
For DeGeorge, an Iraq war veteran and sergeant in the Illinois National Guard, it’s a way to pay it forward — to honor the people who served before him in hopes that, a hundred years from now, someone will remember to honor veterans from today.
In their two-year quest, DeGeorge and Thome, 23, have found dilapidated, neglected headstones and burial plots. In the case of E. Nott Smith, a second lieutenant from Sycamore, who died Sept. 13, 1917, there was no headstone at all.
Looking through the neatly organized three-ring binder that accompanies the couple everywhere, DeGeorge points to a notation on Smith’s burial document that reads “needs 10 cents more.”
The couple offered to pay the 10 cents to secure a headstone for the veteran, but the clerk told them they’d have to find a family member — unlikely with a name like Smith, DeGeorge said. The cost also has increased from 10 cents in 1917 to $500 today.
For now, Smith’s plot at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago near Wrigley Field remains unadorned, but the couple has written a letter to the state in hopes of raising grant money not only for Smith’s gravestone but also to help replace other worn and broken headstones that they’ve found.
While they wait to hear from the state, their hunt continues.
DeGeorge, who has been a Civil War re-enactor since he was a child, started looking for the gravestones of Battery G, 2nd Illinois Light Artillery, the unit his group portrays, two years ago while a student at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.
A friend told him that a member of the unit, Hezekiah Comstock, was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in DeKalb, only a couple blocks from campus, DeGeorge said, leafing through the binder until he found Comstock’s tab, where all the veteran’s information is stored, including dates of enlistment and discharge from the military, death, photos and old newspaper clippings.
After finding that first gravestone, DeGeorge was hooked, and it wasn’t long before Thome started accompanying him on his campaign to find them all.
Their friends joke about them hanging out with their “dead people” — for two years now, they’ve planned their vacations around the graves of these men. In fact, before they were to marry in Colorado on Dec. 21, they planned to visit John W. Lowell’s grave at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.
Lowell was the superintendent of the Sycamore School System before joining Battery G on Aug. 6, 1861. After the war, he moved to Colorado and became a cattle rancher and state legislator. He died March 20, 1920.
Sometimes knowing the cemetery isn’t enough — bodies are moved and cemeteries are renamed.
Records showed that Charles J. Mellburg, who wrote his name “Melburg” on his second enlistment, was buried at the International Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery in Rock Falls. When Coloma Township took over the care of the cemetery 20 years ago, it renamed it Coloma Township Cemetery.



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