After McHenry Twp. graveyard dig fails to unearth answers, new clues sought to ID boy buried there in 1963

Greg Alderson remembers his mother telling him about the young boy buried in 1963 at McHenry Township’s Ostend Cemetery.

Alderson, 67, does not remember being told the boy was never identified. Alderson does remember that his mother, who died in 2009, told him two other cemetery boards declined a request to bury the Black child in their graveyard because of the color of his skin.

“The only reason I remember this is my mother telling me,” Alderson, now of Gurnee, said. “I assumed it was a little Black boy who was from here” and drowned.

His mother, Betty Alderson, was the daughter of Vinton F. and Grace E. (Plagge) Thompson. Before the cemetery was renamed for the long-gone village of Ostend, it was known as the Thompson Burial Ground.

“We will go forward as we deem necessary.”

—  McHenry County Coroner Michael Rein

Alderson’s third great-grandfather, Apollos Thompson, founded the plot in 1842 when his wife, Lucinda, died. According to modern news stories, Lucinda died just weeks after Apollos brought his family to Illinois from Ohio.

On Monday, Alderson came back to the cemetery on Route 120 to see if being there would spark a memory of where the child’s remains may be.

His visit came a week after McHenry County officials exhumed a grave in hopes of finding the boy’s remains. Remains of an adult were instead uncovered.

McHenry County Coroner Michael Rein said last week he was “disheartened” the dig was not successful but that the search has not ended.

“It was a setback” in the search for the boy’s identity, Rein said in an interview, adding that more exhumations “are on hold for now. We will go forward as we deem necessary.”

Alderson was just 7 when the child was buried in June 1963. He does not remember going to the service but does remember mowing the one-acre cemetery as a teen. In his mind, Alderson thought the grave was closer to Route 120 and a few trees on the west side of the property.

That area has markers for the McCullom and Miller families. After walking the grounds on Monday, Alderson said It would make sense to dig where the grave was uncovered last week, he said.

“It was a different time,” Alderson said. If a farmhand died and the farmer didn’t know how to contact his family, the man would have been buried there, as were babies. “Burials like that happened in the back corner.”

Rein said his office and the McHenry County Sheriff’s office continue to seek information that might help identify the grave and, eventually, the boy.

According to news reports from the time he was buried, the boy was found by children in the water near the McHenry dam, wrapped in a bedspread, and, despite reportedly being covered in bruises and lacerations, his cause of death was ruled bronchial pneumonia.

The “holy grail” of the investigation would be either photos from the funeral or finding someone who was at the service 60 years ago “who remembers, 100%, I was here” and where the grave is, Rein said.

Alderson does not remember if the gravesite was ever pointed out to him. He does remember walking from the family farm a mile south of the cemetery to put flowers on graves.

“Every year, my mother and grandmother would plant flowers at every family member’s grave,” Alderson said.

It is gratifying, Alderson said, to see the cemetery now, with some of the headstones reinforced or replaced over the years and a new fence surrounding it. “They are really taking care of it, or it would have been forgotten.”