The Madison County
Nursing Home & Infirmary records date to approximately 1961 and
are currently in the custody of the Madison County Treasurer's
Office. The following compilation was generated from the
original record books in February 2000 by Mark W. DeLawyer and
Jean E. Dievendorf.
This compilation
however, is not complete. For some reason the original books
have a great deal of duplication of entries. This would not be a
problem if the entries matched (indeed, this proved invaluable
when we were trying to decipher some of the spellings) but in
most cases they do not. There were also many double entries with
the first names spelled different, or completely different. The
difficulty seems to begin with entries made at the turn of the
century and only gets worse. By the late 1930's, it was obvious
that the best we could do was an educated guess with respect to
accuracy. Month and day rarely matched. More often than not, the
dates of death were off by as much as a year and we have no way
to determine which is the correct date.
As a result, the
compilers decided to only generate this list up to the point
where we knew that accurate records would be available
elsewhere. It is our hope that the following will prove an
impetus for others to completely transcribe all of the Madison
County Home records into a computer database which can be
merged and collated to separate the duplicate listings.
Users of this list
are strongly cautioned regarding spellings and dates of death.
If you find anything which is close to a name you are interested
in, your best bet is to access the original books and then check
death records for the name. You should also be ready to check up
to a year before or after the date we have provided as, once
again, we can not determine if it is always correct.
The following
compilation covers the period from the 1850's to the late 1930's
although there are a few entries from the 1950's. Confirmed
burials at the county cemetery are noted with an asterisk and
most of these are from the 1880's and 1890's. There are
undoubtedly more burials than the list indicates.
In addition, there
appears to be only one gravestone at the county cemetery. This
is over the grave of Huldah Root. Although far from complete,
the list contains nearly 700 names.
Mark W. DeLawyer and
Jean E. Dievendorf
February 2000
[Note: The Town of Eaton clerk noted the last
confirmed burial in the records is November 7, 1930. The first
burial is not known . The opening of the Poor Farm dates to circa 1828. AMI]