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Chicago Area Cemetery Cant Find Dads Grave |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Sunday, 31 July 2005 |
By Jodi S. Cohen
Tribune staff reporter
July 31, 2005
Mary Hurst lost her father for the first time on Nov. 10, 1966, the day cancer took his life. Now she feels like she's lost him all over again after calling St. Sava Cemetery near Libertyville, where she attended his burial.
She learned officials there can't find his grave, and that may mean she won't be able to fulfill the wish of her 80-year-old mother--who is dying--to be buried alongside her husband.
"When you entrust these people with this, you expect them to take care of it," Hurst said from her home in Ft. Worth. "Think about it. Just think about what they've done. You have my mother's last wishes, which can't be taken care of."
A St. Sava Cemetery official acknowledges poor record keeping and wonders whether Hurst's father may be buried in an unmarked grave. Another possible explanation he offers is that documents may have been lost when the cemetery changed hands in the late 1970s after a bitter split in the Serbian Orthodox Church.
The state comptroller's office oversees cemeteries, but religious burial grounds such as St. Sava are exempt from state regulation.
All this has led to a frantic search by Hurst, who calls state officials and Serbian organizations nearly every day, looking for anyone who might help her. She had planned to take her mother to the cemetery while her mother could still travel.
"I would hate to think my mother couldn't see my dad's grave before she died. I would like for her to be able to say, `Hey, I'm coming,'" said Hurst, who owns a commercial cleaning service and has cared for her mother since her father died.
Hurst said she was there when her father, Dragoljub Ilic, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, was buried. She said she saw the headstone on his grave. His death certificate also indicates St. Sava as his burial place.
"I have never heard one quite this bizarre," said Helen Sclair, a Chicago cemetery historian. Sclair said it wasn't uncommon to have trouble locating the graves of loved ones buried in the 19th Century, but that problem is rare in today's society.
The first burials at St. Sava came in the late 1920s and, in the years since, the cemetery has become the final resting place for hundreds of Serbian immigrants. King Peter II of Yugoslavia is buried in the floor of a church on the cemetery grounds, reportedly the only king buried on American soil.
Ilic was born in a small village near Belgrade on Aug. 10, 1917. A soldier in King Peter II's army, he relocated to Germany during World War II before moving to the United States in 1950, Hurst said. An immigrant with five children, Ilic worked as a painter and lived near Humboldt Park, records show.
His death certificate and funeral card list his burial location as St. Sava, a monastery, theology school and cemetery near the border of Libertyville and Warren Township. A monument at the cemetery, which lists members of the charitable organization Serbian Brothers Help, includes Ilic's name and the years he lived and died engraved on a silver plaque in Cyrillic letters.
Only 16 when her father died, Hurst said she remembers his small funeral service, conducted in English and a Yugoslavian language. The mass card included a poem: "Gone is the soul that we have loved; A husband who has done his work. A father who was loved by all; Who from his duties did not shirk."
Muzyka & Sons Funeral Home in Chicago handled the arrangements, including $245 for a vault, $10 for the musician's fee and a floral arrangement for $110, according to an itemized list of expenses.
A sales agreement lists an $80 grave and $150 for a reserved grave, which Hurst said was for her mother. She has no records of the purchase of a gravestone, which she said was provided by a Serbian organization.
No family members have visited the cemetery since they left Chicago a few months after Ilic's death, Hurst said.
Funeral home owner Margaret Muzyka said her firm's records from 1966 were destroyed in a flood, although a book lists Ilic's funeral and burial in St. Sava, she said. Muzyka suspects that Ilic is buried in an unmarked grave, as were some poor immigrants of that time period.
"She has no proof" of a grave marker, Muzyka said. "With all the years that passed, nobody went to visit or can remember where he is?"
Metropolitan Christopher, a top official of the Serbian Orthodox Church who lives near the cemetery, said Hurst should have documents that show ownership of a plot. Without records, the cemetery can do nothing more, he said.
"If this person claims to have someone buried there, they should have some type of valid documentation. ... We will do everything that is possible if she produces a document identifying the grave so we can look in our records to see if such a burial took place," he said.
Further, he said, "Doesn't it tell you something that the person never visited her father's grave? If she visited it, she would know where it's at."
When Ilic was buried in 1966, the 200 acres of St. Sava were at the center of a bitter dispute, with two Serbian church groups claiming they owned the monastery, cemetery and other church property. In 1979, a judge ended the 16-year court battle when he ordered the land returned to the Serbian Orthodox Church of America. The other faction moved out and relocated to an area near Grayslake.
Cemetery records turned over to the church are in a disorganized black, leather-bound book that the cemetery administrator acknowledges is "in really bad order." There seems to be no system for listing the names.
Sasha Nedic, a graduate of St. Sava's School of Theology and the cemetery administrator, said he has looked several times through the two cemetery areas where Ilic would have been buried. In his five years overseeing the cemetery, the lost grave is a first, he said. Some graves are unmarked, and when the cemetery changed hands in 1979, some graves were moved to property in Third Lake near Grayslake.
"If he was buried here and nobody wrote it down, there's nothing I can do. She doesn't have any documents, and we don't either," he said.
Rev. Aleksandar Ivanovich, secretary of the Serbian Orthodox New Gracanica Metropolitanate in Third Lake, was based at the Libertyville cemetery in 1966. Though he said some bodies were moved when the church lost control of the property, Ilic was not among them.
"It's impossible to remember" what happened, Ivanovich said about the period when Ilic was buried. "Probably they didn't record it."
But Hurst and her brother, Milan Ilic, remember their father's service at the funeral home and another service at the grave. Hurst said she returned to the cemetery three months later with her mother to see the marker, which listed the names of all his children.
Soon after, the family moved to California and later to Texas.
Though Milan Ilic didn't see the gravestone, he remembers his mother talking about it.
"She told us there was a tombstone, and she was telling about how all the kids were on the tombstone," said Ilic.
Hurst says her mother, who never remarried, wants to be buried with her husband. Because the family lives in Texas, Hurst began inquiring of St. Sava how her father could be disinterred and moved.
She now plans to visit St. Sava this week to walk through the cemetery and try to find someone who might know where her father is.
"Can you imagine to not ever know what happened to him?" Hurst said. "You know you buried him, and you can go see him. With my dad, we don't have that option."
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Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0507310257jul31,1,7308928.story
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