Cemeteries

SCCGS’s cemetery committee was the recipient of state and national awards for its work preserving records of more than 370 cemeteries throughout St. Clair. Chief among these hardworking dedicated people are the former co-chairs, now deceased, Else E. Schmidt and Martha Mae Schmidt. Volunteers continue their legacy, contact SCCGS.

On-site tombstone readings may provide family historians with birth and death dates before statewide vital records were required in 1916.

On our websites

• TOMBSTONE SURNAME INDEX for 150 of about 370+ cemeteries in the county which appear in SCCGS publications up to 2008. Excludes Booker T. Washington (Centreville), Mt. Hope, St. Clair Memorial Park, and Walnut Hill (Belleville)
• CEMETERIES BY LOCATION (Township, Range, Section), crossroad, and publication information.
• About
  • BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Cemetery, Centreville – history of records preserved for this historic African-American burial site.
  • MT. HOPE Cemetery, Belleville – burial record availability, maps, history. Burials indexed on Lot Cards is a new Member benefit (June 2022). Join SCCGS.
  • ST. CLAIR MEMORIAL PARK Cemetery (Canteen-Stites Township) — a transcription from cemetery lot cards.
  • WALNUT HILL Cemetery (Belleville)
    • Monument photographs for a few areas of the cemetery
    • Names and dates transcribed from Lot Cards for about  23,000 of the 31,000 people buried here from 1878-1992.
    • The Original sexton’s books (1855-1878) and other tools are online, courtesy of Belleville City Hall here.
    • Our website’s search box (upper right) may help locate burials documented on our Walnut Hill webpages (look for Walnut Hill among the ‘hits’).
• The Classroom in the member site showcases new information about St. Clair’s cemeteries.

Cemetery books by SCCGS

Pay by check (limited titles) or through the online store (all titles, some as e-books).

Note: The 2001 edition of the Shiloh Valley Township Cemeteries has errors in the old Holy Childhood of Jesus Cemetery. The correct burials in Holy Childhood of Jesus appear in the Mascoutah Township Cemeteries book, published 2011.

Consult our Research Guide, not only for records held by SCCGS, but also for resources held at the local, state, and national level.

Quarterly articles

The Old Burial Ground (Belleville), Harrison, and early Belleville Cemeteries (in Quarterly Volume 28 Number 3) are but a few of those which appear throughout the Quarterly.