SCAG is wrapping up its nearly decade long Find a Grave project this fall. One of our members, Diane Tourilla, originally proposed the idea in 2015, which included these action steps:
- Take a picture of gravesites (tombstones) in St. Cloud cemeteries
- For each gravesite, create a Find a Grave memorial (webpage for the deceased person)
- Attach the person’s obituary to the memorial
The project began with North Star Cemetery, and eventually expanded to include Assumption and Calvary cemeteries in St. Cloud.
Once the project was approved, Diane began taking pictures of headstones in the cemeteries. Soon, other people not associated with SCAG took on this role, allowing SCAG to focus on the other aspects of the project.
Diane and a couple other members of SCAG, Eunice Sankey and Connie Viere, began to set up the memorials, adding in the gravesite pictures. This same team, along with myself and a couple non-SCAG members, Laurie Eid and Wendy Sykes, began researching and adding obituaries to these pages, which proved to be a very intense step.
Although North Star Cemetery was established as early as 1864, we focused our research on death dates between 1887 and 2021, mostly due to available resources. To find the obituaries, the team used the St. Cloud Times Obituary Index CDs for 1887-1907 and 1908-1927. SCAG created these CDs in the late 1980s and later donated them to the Great River Regional Library in St. Cloud. The library added the information on the CDs to their online index of obituaries, which ranges from 1928 until the present.
Even though some of the obituaries were listed in the index, some were not, so not every memorial has a corresponding obituary. Other people simply did not have an obituary written about them when they passed away, which sometimes happens to this day.
Altogether, the project took about nine years to complete, but two of these years saw little to no progress due to COVID-19. Since 2019, the team entered 17,740 obituaries:
- North Star had 5,376.
- Assumption had 4,015.
- Calvary had 8,349.
- Another 53 were connected to various other cemeteries in the area.
Prior to 2019, the team did not tally the number of obituaries being added to the memorials, so the total number of obituaries we entered into Find a Grave is probably much higher.
At this point, there are no plans to add obituaries from 2022 to the present due to Find a Grave's policy of preferring memorials and information be added within the first 12 months after a person’s death by family members.
Over the course of the project, we gained insight into the history of St. Cloud and the people who lived there. We also saw firsthand how obituaries changed over the years. Some of the most notable changes include:
- Obituary formats. In earlier times, obituaries were a “fill-in” for newspapers, meaning they were scattered about in many sections, wherever they would fit. Now obituaries are often alphabetized and within a dedicated section of the paper.
- Community status. In the past, community leaders typically had the most complete obituaries. Now everyone, regardless of community position, has the opportunity to have a descriptive/informational obituary published. I believe this is due to the fact that people are now either writing their own obituaries or their family members are doing so.
- Gender. It is now more common for women to be identified as individuals, rather than an extension of their husbands. Previously, for example, Susan Jones was listed as Mrs. John Jones in an obituary.
As we wrap up the Find a Grave project, I’d like to thank everyone who assisted us with this huge endeavor. Additionally, I don’t know who worked on those original St. Cloud Times Obituary Index CDs, but we owe a huge thank you to them! This task would have been even more difficult, if not impossible, if not for this information compiled earlier by that group
