St. Mary Catholic Cemetery
Trenton, Sugar Creek Township
Clinton County, Illinois
SENW21 T2N R5W
Copyrighted by Gloria Dettleff
& Dorothy Falk – February 2006St. Mary Cemetery is located on the north side of Old U.S. Highway 50 several blocks east of the Trenton City Limits in Sugar Creek Township. It is a well-kept and continually operational cemetery.
This reading is current as of January 2006. We thank St. Mary Church for sharing their records through 1931 (privacy year) which greatly assisted us in aligning the grave numbers and also provided information that does not appear on the stones. Please see the key below for all abbreviations and an explanation of symbols.
The cemetery officially began in 1871 but there are a few graves that date back to 1865. Additional land was acquired in 1924 and again in 1961. It is estimated that most of the original 1871 cemetery area is filled with graves but many are not marked or recorded.
There was a problem in the earlier days with the markers between single lots and family lots, some intermingled. The problem was corrected when the Church converted to a section, block and row system. If you correspond with the Church, be sure to use their Lot #.
Section A – This section, which is part of the original 1871 cemetery space, consists of family lots and rows of single graves. The single row graves appear to be chronological burials. This section consists of adult and some children graves with many inscriptions written in German. We translated these to the best of our ability. Row #1 grave # is located next to the grassy aisle leading to the crucifix and just east of Circle Drive with consecutive numbers going south toward Highway 50.
Section B – This section is on the north side of the crucifix with Row #1 grave #1 located next to the grassy aisle leading to the crucifix and just east of Circle Drive with consecutive numbers going north towards the woods. This section is also part of the original 1871 cemetery and contains some stones written in German. The children’s graves begin at about row 8 and continue to the tree lined border. Many of the older stones nearer the trees are severely deteriorated and are very difficult to read. There are undoubtedly many unmarked graves in this area.
Section C – This section is on the north side of Circle Drive with Row #1 grave # beginning at the junction of sections B and C and just north of the top of Circle Drive. A portion of the earlier Section, and the newest part, have concrete strip pads for the placement of headstones. Note – there are no stones in row 3 of Section C.
Section D – This section is on the inside of Circle Drive and is currently reserved for priests.
Section U – These are the people that the Death Registers and the Church records say have been buried in St. Mary, but the exact location of the burial is Unknown. Some of the locations could be assumed to be in the lot with someone with the same surname, but that is the researcher’s decision. They are on no plat. Some could be erroneous.
Section Other – These are the people that are buried in cemeteries other than in St. Mary but were included in the St. Mary church burial records. We chose to include these here to preserve the data.
Parentage – In the comment section, when we knew who the parents were, we wrote the person was the child of Father’s first name and Mother’s first name and her maiden name. We did not repeat the surname of the child and father, unless they were different, to save space.
Privacy – We removed all names of people who were listed on a stone, usually sharing with a deceased person, if their birth date was 1906 or more recent and no death date. We substituted the name "Living". If the line says Marriage or Parents or if it has a dash in Maiden name or birth date, that means we might have the privacy data and will furnish it to you on a need-to-know basis.
Updates – If you prefer to have your engraved data shown, let us know. If you know of other changes, engraved or not, let us know about those, too. That includes additional names. And let us know if you’d like us to show your name and email for other researchers to contact you for that particular person.
ABBREVIATIONS
·
GHS means Government Military Head Stone for the Illinois Veterans’ Commission use. These stones may actually be in a footstone or side stone position.·
PHS means Private Military Head Stone. This information differentiates the government head stone from the privately purchased head stone.·
S/w means the deceased "shares the stone with"·
* Means the stone is engraved in German and we translated it into English.·
+ Means we added information from the St. Mary’s Church burial records and translated the given names from Latin. + After the person’s name means the whole line came from the church records.
Alphabetical Listing
Other Helpful Links:
St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Carlyle, IL (Also Clinton County)
Sugar Creek Township Cemeteries Index
Clinton County Cemeteries Index