‘Dead people always seem to get in the way of the living.’ Facing death with Chicago’s ‘Cemetery Lady’ Helen Sclair.

This is not an obituary for Chicago’s “Cemetery Lady.”

After all, Helen Sclair, the sometimes-prickly yet always engaging former schoolteacher turned self-taught historian, lecturer, collector, tour guide and author died of cardiac arrest on Dec. 16, 2009, at 78 years old.

Instead, this is a celebration of the ever-growing afterlife of a woman who spent so many of her days thinking about death.

Sclair’s final resting place is the same as her last known address — Bohemian National Cemetery on the Northwest Side. Her cremated remains lie under a headstone bearing the inscription, “An advocate for the dead.”

She lived the last eight years of her life tucked away in a former caretaker’s cottage on the grounds — which provided ample room to display her thousands of pieces of death memorabilia, according to Paul F. Gehl, a former curator at the Newberry Library.

“Visiting her at home was like getting a docent-led tour of a museum. Everything displayed in an order clear only to her, but explainable,” Gehl wrote in an email. “Mourning jewelry, Halloween novelties, embalming tools and chemicals, funeral home giveaways (including toys!), books and magazines, postcards of cemeteries, and photographs of funeral floral arrangements. Mind-boggling just to remember it all.”

In fact, after she died, the Newberry acquired her collection — one of the largest and most diverse he’s seen, Gehl said — for inclusion in the library’s holdings.

Sclair was obsessed with death. She displayed caskets at her house and had a skull-and-crossbones motif on her personal checks — but she never attempted to communicate with the dead. That just wasn’t her thing.

“I never discuss ghosts,” Sclair said in 1999. “I have no interest in the subject.”

However, her afterlife was just beginning.

Born into death

Sclair’s own life confronted death almost from its beginning. She was born Dec. 30, 1930, in Chicago, to parents who’d recently returned from missionary work in Africa. Her mother, Helen, died just one week later and was buried near her southeastern Missouri hometown.

An only child, Sclair was sent to live with William and Helen Weber, who owned a duck farm in suburban Lake Villa.

“Mother was raised as one of Helen’s children. Now, that created a little bit of a problem because everyone was named Helen in those days,” said Lu Helen Sclair, her daughter. “So, Mother’s nickname was ‘Susie,’ and that’s so far apart from anything she ever would have called herself.”

Sclair’s biological father, Irvin L. Young, was a successful inventor and businessman whose philanthropic efforts in Africa helped Lincoln Park Zoo acquire its iconic gorilla, Bushman, and, later, four baby gorillas. One was named after him. As generous as he was, he devoted little time to his only child.

However, Sclair’s guardians demonstrated the importance of family — both living and dead. At 2 1/4 u00bd, they took her to visit her birth mother’s grave. Her first job was trimming grass from the Weber family’s headstones. She recalled the experience in Studs Terkel’s 2001 book, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.” Within the book she also described how her growing interest in death was kindled out of boredom:

“There was no movie theater in the town that I grew up in, so you went to funerals. That was the thing to do. My goodness, you had to get the paper because it would be terrible if you missed a funeral.”","additional_properties":{"comments":1/83/8,"inline_comments":1/83/83/4,"_id":"FMURX6HHHVGBJKTO4GXQEVCKFY

Helen Sclair in “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith” by Studs Terkel (2001)

Growing legacy

After her death, almost all of the items from Sclair’s cemetery cottage, the piles upon piles of research papers and cemetery informational brochures, photographs of headstones and death care industry research were all transferred to the Newberry Library, where they would be cataloged and preserved.

“We filled three large panel vans floor to ceiling with books and papers and anything printed,” Lu Helen Sclair said.

“It was a memorable weekend, three or four days in the middle of the summer. It was beastly hot,” Gehl said. “There was one little air conditioner in the house. It was a cute little cottage that she had. It was filled from top to bottom with material.”

Her materials, most not yet digitized, continue to provide inspiration for a new generation of death-related researchers.

Samantha “Sam” Smith, pursuing a doctorate in history at Michigan State University, became interested in Sclair’s collection of post-mortem photographs and used them for a capstone project.

“Unlike people who collect stamps or coins, it is impossible to collect all of ‘death.’” Smith wrote in an email. “Sclair’s collection is incomplete, and that is part of its beauty, for me at least.”

Several small groupings from Sclair’s collection have been displayed at the Newberry. These include fans, which were used by funeralgoers to cool themselves before air conditioning was common, and ribbons with designs on both sides, which were worn by union and/or fraternal organization members.

A monumental discovery

Sclair found herself alone in the early 1980s. Her daughter was studying nursing at Indiana University. Her second husband, Marvin, had died in 1975.

She taught at Gladstone Elementary on the Near West Side but was looking for something else to occupy her time. She was intrigued by an idea.

“I had heard that Chicago’s Lincoln Park had once been a cemetery. Some of it? All of it? None of it? And if it had been a cemetery, what happened to all the bodies and monuments? Idle curiosity!” Sclair said in 2004.

It had been more than a century since burials took place in the Chicago City Cemetery, which was north of North Avenue along the lakefront and outside the then-city limits. Bodies were later relocated to other cemeteries due to a variety of factors — city expansion northward; health risks associated with rising lake levels and their proximity to decaying bodies buried in shallow graves; and a lawsuit concerning one of the cemetery’s sections.

How to find out more? Google and Ancestry.com didn’t exist yet.

“As my college career had been spent as a voice major, I knew little about research,” Sclair later admitted.

When she went looking for the city’s cemetery records, experts guessed they’d been lost to the Great Fire of 1871. More than 110 years later, however, boxes of old papers were found in a South Side warehouse and sent to Springfield for conservation. When the Illinois Regional Archives Depository opened at Northeastern Illinois University in 1990, the cemetery documents were there — and so was Sclair.

Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Grossman wrote, “Sclair seems to have been the first to guess that the archive might contain records of the old lakefront cemetery. ... Eventually, she found more than 600 relevant documents, had them photographed, then copied by hand their virtually illegible 19th Century handwritings.”

The discovery of this “demographic gold mine of undertakers’ reports” was monumental — especially for a novice. “It’s a one-in-a-million shot,” Melvin Holli, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in 1991.

Her discovery confirmed bodies still remain buried beneath Lincoln Park.

“You ask me why people find this interesting? Well, first off no one has really done what I do. Here you get into burial customs, mourning customs, funerary customs, preference of material, color of stone. It’s endless, just endless.”","additional_properties":{"comments":1/83/8,"inline_comments":1/83/83/4,"_id":"TCVQBAF6AVFGLCCK2WEUP7ZZOA

Helen Sclair, Oct. 31, 1997, interview with CNN

Pushing her passion forward

Sclair continued to research cemeteries and gave lectures and tours. “With dramatic flairs, a voice that commands attention and fascinating visuals, she explains the city’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions, the economic and social classes and the family structure,” the Tribune reported about one of her classes in 1997.

Costumes and props were customized for Sclair’s presentations, including 1915 1/4 u2032s Eastland Disaster, the Great Fire of 1871 and the Wingfoot Express crash of 1919. “She would dress for every occasion — no, let’s say, every disaster occasion,” said Craig Pfannkuche, a local historian and friend.

Still, she took the topics seriously. She located “missing” cemeteries in the Chicago area — finding 63 of them — and categorized cemeteries by their poignant features. For example, you can be buried next to your pets only at Elm Lawn Cemetery in Elmhurst.

She became so knowledgeable about death that Sclair would often correct anyone — regardless of their credentials — who misrepresented historical facts.

“Professional historians, and I am one, can be very snobbish about people who are avocational historians,” Gehl said. “I’m sure that Helen suffered some of that. There were people who felt she was merely an amateur. That was truly not fair to her because she was a very dedicated researcher. She was very thorough but she was also in the habit of challenging professional historians when she thought they made a mistake. And, you know, that’s not a way to make friends.”

“It drives me nuts,” Sclair said in 1997. “That’s why I guess I’ll have to write a book.”

It was around that time Sclair began working with the Chicago Genealogical Society to produce a book of her almost four decades of research. In 2003, with the help of the organization’s members, she presented its leadership with a manuscript — complete with multiple detailed appendices.

Pfannkuche, the corresponding secretary of the group, says a difference in opinion on what the book should include caused Sclair to back out of the partnership. “Helen wanted to write this huge tome on all the city’s cemeteries and all of the burial techniques and all of the interesting stories that came out of the removals from Chicago City Cemetery, the Chicago Genealogical Society people said, ‘No, we don’t want to publish that book.’ ”

Instead, in 2008, one year before Sclair’s death, the society published “Chicago Cemetery Records 1847-1863: Sexton’s reports and certificates, treasurer receipts, deeds, and undertakers’ reports.” Its primary audience — genealogists. It’s a noncirculating reference book housed in the genealogy section of many local libraries that still provides key details about the former cemetery.

“Let me say it this way, I mean, I was part of it. It’s terrible. Well, no, no. It’s wonderful for people who are researching early Chicago. And, curiously, in the book, it doesn’t say who’s buried there. It says who the plot owners are. That’s helpful to genealogists,” Pfannkuche said.

While not the opus Sclair had hoped for, the book is, nonetheless, dedicated to her: “If our city did not have Helen’s thoughtful study of burial and mortuary practices and her work in disseminating that information to others, this city would be a much less interesting place in which to research.”

Today, Sclair’s manuscript of cemetery history with a copyright date of 2003 sits among her collection of papers at the Newberry Library. There are no plans to publish it.

Advocate for the dead

The work that gave her the greatest joy, Sclair once said, was getting to know people and their ethnic and religious traditions shown in Chicago’s cemeteries, which she compiled by hand on yellow pads of paper.

“I can now easily move from Assyrians to Zoroastrians, with the likes of assorted Bosnians, Gypsies, Hungarians, Kurds, Luxembourg’s, Pakistanis, etc., in between,” she said in 2004. “The method often used to locate these far-flung burial sites is the interviewing of cabdrivers, waiters and wheelchair attendants.”

She also became vocal about the problems facing local cemeteries:

On developers buying up open cemetery land: “The dead don’t pay taxes and the dead don’t vote.”

On the maintenance of old or abandoned cemeteries: “There is an assumption with perpetual care that somehow God is going to take care of it. I often ask the question, ‘How long is forever?’ There is money today and tomorrow, but go look in five years. There might not be enough money to cut the grass.”

On the discovery of long-ago buried bodies during construction in Lincoln Park: “They could have left the people in peace instead of in pieces. With backhoes and bulldozers is not the way to approach a piece of land that you know was once a cemetery.”

Really, any time a body was discovered during a construction project, Sclair was consulted for her opinion: “This has been going on for years, the finding of bodies. This is just the latest discovery. Every time they dig for sewers and water, they invariably find the remnants of some cemetery.”

On efforts to relocate nearly 1,500 graves at St. Johannes Cemetery for O’Hare airport expansion: “Dead people always seem to get in the way of the living. But if this cemetery is not moved, it would inhibit the development of the Midwest.”

On the dangers associated with moving the dead — especially those who died in Chicago’s early days: “I will give you the list in alphabetical order. It’s anthrax, cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, typhus and typhoid. When you go to dig up these bodies, it’s not just digging a row for carrots. There are lots of things to worry about.”

Sclair’s legacy

Combining her life’s tragic experiences with her desire to make sure others’ lives were not forgotten helped Sclair better connect with the living. Her life’s work makes the invisible seen again.

Those who love her remember a feisty, determined woman with a passion for sharing her knowledge with others.

“She didn’t have a small presence in anybody’s life,” Gehl said.

2020 is a year overwhelmed with death. More than 1 million people have died worldwide due to COVID-19, including more than 220,000 in the United States and more than 9,700 in Illinois.

Sclair believed a previous pandemic in 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million in the world and 675,000 in the U.S., coupled with tens of millions of deaths due to World War I, caused society to break away from its traditional grieving practices. People were overwhelmed by the shear number of casualties. As a result, we’ve forgotten how to mourn the dead, Sclair said.

“The ease with which people lived with death 100 years ago was the result of an elaborate system of notification. While in mourning, they wore black and only certain kinds of jewelry. Handkerchiefs had black borders — why, the border’s width even indicated the stage of grief. Wreaths were hung on doors, crepes were draped, notices of local deaths tacked up in neighborhood stores, so that grievers had an elaborate communication system at their disposal. This supplied a standard, a system of etiquette that showed others how to express compassion.”","additional_properties":{"comments":1/83/8,"inline_comments":1/83/83/4,"_id":"ENS44TYMJ5GH5OFEEE2Q6FJUS4

Helen Sclair, in a 2000 interview

Sclair found beauty in death — and thought others should too.

“People should think about how they want to be remembered,” she said. “You are not just a piece of something that is on the Earth to be eventually thrown away.”

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