BUTTE - The fence that surrounds the cemetery is broken down. There's no nameplate to identify it. If not for a few cold tombstones jutting through the snow, the final resting place of 36 souls might never be noticed. The site is not even recorded at the county courthouse.
"I have no record of that one," said Dwayne "Dewey" Oster, McLean County recorder. "I've got an old 1914 atlas. As far as I can tell, there's no cemetery marked in there. I don't have a formal platte or anything."
The cemetery is there, of course, but official records of it were likely lost when the congregation of the church that formed the early-day cemetery faded away. In the case of the cemetery six miles south and two miles west of Butte, the 7th Day Adventist Church that was located near the cemetery has disappeared over time.
"There was a 7th Day Adventist Church by the cemetery. It sure used to be there, but I don't think there was ever a name on the cemetery," said Lena Porchun, 98, of Butte. "I knew the people that lived there. There's nobody on the farm anymore. There was also a Menonite church about a mile north of there."
Porchun, who has lived in Butte since 1929, recalls visiting the churches, which she said were primarily attended by Ukranian immigrants who settled in the Butte area. According to a list compiled by the McLean County Genealogical Society, there are 10 Evanenkos and four Harchankos among the 36 Ukranian-sounding names buried in the cemetery.
"We took the names off the tombstones. We didn't go to the families or into the records," said Delores Staehr, Garrison, who participated in the geneology project that was completed in 1997. "The courthouse had a list of about 40 cemeteries and we wound up with about 85. They were legal church cemeteries. Sometimes the church was gone. We'd look in the bushes, usually lilacs, and we'd find grave markers and a lot of them that weren't marked."
Vivan Merkel of Washburn, the curator of the McLean County museum, is the person who has taken on the geneological project. She says the Aurena Township cemetery is among those whose records were never found. Twenty of the marked graves show birthdates prior to 1900. Six other graves have incomplete information, meaning they likely were from early immigrants as well. According to the McLean County Gen-Web Project, there have been only two burials at the cemetery since 1970. The last was in 1980.
In the case of many of the state's rural cemeteries, an existing congregation or descendants of those interred will take on the responsibility of maintaining the cemetery. However, as relatives age or move from an area, they can no longer be counted on to do the work or pay the expense for cemetery upkeep.
"I think we had 175 people living in Butte years ago," recalled Porchun. "Now there's hardly anybody."
