Read by Carol Ryan-Spenader with Dorothy Falk and Gloria Dettleff
Legal Notice: This listing has been prepared under the guidelines of the Illinois Cemetery Protection Act . TRUSTS AND FIDUCIARIES (760 ILCS 100/2a) (external link) (from Ch. 21, par. 64.2a) and Property Sec 765 ILCS 835/1 (external link) Ch 21, P15.
This listing of about 2,900 burials was compiled by reading stones in the cemetery. It is only a partial inventory. There are hundreds of unmarked graves not included here. We did not have access to the burial records for this inventory.
The Trenton Cemetery is privately owned by the Trenton Cemetery Association. They receive no funding from the city or other outside sources. If you find something here to help you in your research, and/or if you wish to inquire if they have additional data, and/or if you’d like to make a small donation towards the upkeep of the cemetery, you may contact them at:
Trenton
Cemetery Association
P. O. Box 55
Trenton, Illinois 62293-0055
Another source of information may be an older computerized listing of the Trenton Cemetery Association’s burials located at the Clinton County Historical Society Museum. A donation to the museum would be appropriate.
Abbreviations and Notes
Updates in Green came from obituaries or other sources
Sec - Section See Plat Map
Gr - Grave - All of row numbers begin in the northwest corner of that section. In all Sections, the grave numbers represent grave markers that are still visible. They are merely in sequence to each other and may not represent how close they are to each other. There could be dozens of unmarked spaces between one number and the next. As new graves are added, this numbering will become out-of-date.
GHS - Government Head Stone
PHS - Private Head Stone
S/w - Shares stone with
Living - the stone shows a person with a birth date less than 100 years but no engraved death date. That person could have remarried or moved away.
Privacy - we may have the data for the Living, contact us on a need-to-know-basis
Parentheses - information is not on the stone
Section U - Unknown location, marks those names found several places stating that person was buried in Trenton, but we didn’t find anything else to indicate exactly where they were buried. It’s possible the next-of-kin changed their minds and the person was buried elsewhere. Or they might be buried in Trenton’s St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery with no record there either. Or they might be recorded under a different spelling or different name.
