Do you know something about local Jewish history? If so, you could assist a Milwaukee-area project aimed at identifying Jewish names, to help make sense of age-old burial records.
These records include the names of 2,480 bodies exhumed from the four cemeteries of the Milwaukee County Grounds, which provided burials for nearly 10,000 poor, ill or “indigent” individuals between 1852 and 1974.
Some individuals are believed to have been Jewish, given the Jewish presence in Milwaukee at the time.
Cemetery 2, the largest of the four cemeteries, saw over half of its graves destroyed from construction in 1932, and another 800 covered by a roadway in 1985. In 1991, 1,649 bodies were exhumed, and in 2013, another 831. University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is holding the total of 2,480 bodies, according to the Descendent Community, a local nonprofit.
The unexhumed parties are left buried under the original cemetery sites, many of which are neglected or paved over. The sites of the Milwaukee County Grounds are in Wauwatosa, including within the current Froedtert Hospital grounds.
Judy Klimt Houston, a Glendale native now living in Madison, learned about the disturbance of the Milwaukee County Grounds through her research on family genealogy, which led her to discover that her Aunt Jennie, who died at just shy of 2 years old in a home for dependent children, was buried on these grounds.
Houston founded the Descendent Community, a local nonprofit, in 2023 to identify and “restore dignity” to the exhumed remains. She believes a number of these remains are Jewish and is looking to the Jewish community for help identifying them.
“I wanted to do right by Jennie,” Houston said, “and then I started learning about all these other people. It’s not just my family – it’s all these families that were connected to faith communities, and nobody is aware of what has happened.”
Rhonda Plotkin, a long-time Wisconsin Jewish community member, became involved with the Descendent Community after discovering that some of her family members received treatment at one or more of the facilities on the Milwaukee County Grounds. Luckily, they were able to leave the facilities and lead good lives, Plotkin said.
Plotkin said that the “story of immigrants” behind these remains intrigued her, and that as a Jew the “sacredness of the burial and principles that we live by” is especially resonant.
Last year, the Descendant Community gained legal custody of the remains of the 831 bodies exhumed in 2013, “a decision now under appeal in circuit court,” according to Houston. For now, the nonprofit is trying to identify as many names as they can through the burial ledger and other documents, hoping they will be able to rebury the bodies soon.
Houston is calling on Wisconsin Jewish community members to find familiar names on the Find A Grave website, findagrave.com. “Perhaps we could find someone that has a really good understanding of Jewish genealogy, who then would try to see if that individual, or those individuals, belonged to a synagogue in Milwaukee at that time, or if they were part of a certain area,” Houston said.
“Our goal is to find relatives, but sometimes that’s not possible,” Houston said. “But what if we can connect them to their faith community? These are people who held those same beliefs.”
“It’s important to restore that connection from the ancestor to their faith community, to at least have them embrace their name returned – that restoration of humanity.”
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How to help
The Descendent Community, a local group, is working to identify human remains that could be Jewish. Would you be willing to go through lists of names? People familiar with the Milwaukee Jewish community or with some knowledge of Jewish genealogy are invited to contact Judy Klimt Houston at jhouston@descendantcommunity.org.
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