Cook County Cemetery at Dunning

With over 38,000 burials spanning some seventy years, Cook County Cemetery at Dunning served as an institutional cemetery for the Cook County institutions.

These consisted of the County Poor house and poor farm opened 1854, the Insane Asylum opened 1869, the infirmary opened 1882, and the Consumptive hospital (TB), opened 1899

It served as an institutional cemetery and more important, it served as the official county Potters Field for the unclaimed and unwanted dead of Chicago and Cook County. The cemetery received bodies from the Cook County Hospital, the city morgue, many Chicago area hospitals, and many city social institutions.

Land set aside for pauper burials is so very vulnerable in our changing world. Living relatives are often difficult or impossible to locate, and neither the public or private sector readily accept the responsibility to care for old forgotten cemeteries.
We who believe that every life is sacred, must continue to remind ourselves and society that in this world and after death, we still care for those who have gone before us.  We make no judgments, but simply commend them to the mercy of our loving Creator. We may not have known them personally, but they were someone’s Mother, Father, Grandparent, or neighbor. It has been written: To live and die alone is a human tragedy, but not to be remembered and mourned…after earthly life…is an ugly blemish on human dignity. These persons, though their earthly lives ended in loneliness and poverty, in unique ways unknown to us, they did share in the divine creation and eternal destiny that is common to our humanity.
Preserving Cook County Cemetery and continuing research will help to insure that those persons who were homeless in life will not be homeless in death.

For the entire story, and a free searchable database of some 7000 names:

http://www.cookcountycemetery.com

For a 1989 article about the rediscovery of this cemetery

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/grave-mistake/Content?oid=874451