2024-11-09 41 -87

Location

In one of the many cemeteries within the suburb of Forest Park.

Participants

Haberdasher (talk)

Expedition

This is another expedition that almost didn't happen, but luckily my dad was in for an adventure that day.

The town of Forest Park is known for having a lot of cemeteries--some say there are more dead people there than living relatives, and that might well be accurate--but we'd never visited this one before, though we'd driven past it a million times on the highway. The bridge to the part of the cemetery on the other side of the Des Plaines River was out, but luckily we didn't need it, though it seemed like the hashpoint was about as far as you could get from the cemetery entrance while not crossing the bridge in the process.

I made a point of getting extra close to the hashpoint in the hopes of identifying the Coffin Potato achievement winners most definitively. As it happens, I'm still not sure exactly which of the clustered gravestones there fell closest to the hashpoint, but my best guess is that it's the Nelson family: Charles E. Nelson, Elizabeth L. Nelson, and Kathryn N. Read (presumably nee Nelson). Three Coffin Potato winners for the price of one! I had hoped to do some genealogy research on them, but alas, I had little luck finding any records about the, probably largely because Nelson is such a common surname to begin with.

Getting back out of the cemetery was an adventure in and of itself, and we ended up paralleling the highway from the other side of the fence for a bit as we tried to retrace our steps before finally making it back out the way we came in. It was a gloomy day, and rain was in the forecast, but thankfully the rain didn't hit until after we got back home safely.