Oak Woods Cemetery is located in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois. It is a private cemetery owned and operated by Dignity Corporation, and is not affiliated with any church denomination. It is one of the more significant historic cemeteries on Chicago's south side with burial sites of renowned figures like Mayor Harold Washington, civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, and Olympian Jesse Owens. The cemetery was established in 1855 but burials did not take place until 1860.

If you call the Oak Woods Cemetery office they will look up one or two burials for you over the phone. However if you have more than that you must make a request in writing (online or snail mail) and there is a fee. The staff are great in assisting the public. However please be patient as The Oak Woods Cemetery Association does not have the staff to perform extensive genealogy over the phone and there is a $10.00 fee per lookup request for location information for the interred. So when they give you information over the phone they are doing you a huge favor given their limited resources. Over the phone they cannot provide the names of all interred in a family plot. This requires a formal request.

Oak Woods Cemetery Association

Unis Nowak, Manager

1035 E 67th St, Chicago, IL 60637

(773) 288-3800 (Same as the cemetery office)

Their cemetery burial records are not online. They are at the cemetery office. For over the phone support, the staff only has an alphabetized list with names and date of death. They cannot sort or otherwise analyze the data. If you visit the office, unless you are a family member you are not allowed to look at the record due to privacy guidelines. The only information provided to the general public is the location of the grave. To obtain this information you must have the deceased's name and year of burial. The burial record may (but will not always) contain the person's name, year of burial, age at burial, owner of the grave, section, lot, and grave number. They can sometimes tell you if there is a marker (gravestone, plaque, etc.). However, their records will in some cases indicate there isn't one when there is. So always check the actual grave since the records can be incomplete or in error. Please note this is not the staff's fault. It's simply a part of historic record keeping. Maps of the cemetery, section and lot are provided at the cemetery office if you visit. There is a picture of the cemetery map included in the FindaGrave memorial.

Oak Woods Cemetery records are housed onsite. There is some possibility for in-depth record searches which includes a fee per person as described. Terms may change. 

The Cook County Clerk's office serves as the official record keeper for births, marriages and deaths that occur in Chicago if you are unsure of the date of death of someone interred at Oak Woods Cemetery.

At the time of its opening Oak Woods was beyond the city limits, but it is now part of a very urban neighborhood called Greater Grand Crossing. The cemetery is located at 1035 E. 67th Street and covers an area of 183 acres. Oak Woods is bound by the streets 67th to the north, Woodlawn / Dorchester to the east, 71st to the south and Cottage Grove to the west. Oak Woods is 1.5 miles east of Interstate 94 at the 63rd Street exit. The grounds are beautiful and include grassy hills, ponds, large trees.

Camp Douglas, in Chicago, Illinois, was one of the largest Union Army prisoner-of-war camps for Confederate soldiers taken prisoner during the American Civil War. Based south of the city on the prairie, it was also used as a training and detention camp for Union soldiers. The Union Army first used the camp in 1861 as an organizational and training camp for volunteer regiments. It became a prisoner-of-war camp in early 1862. Later in 1862 the Union Army again used Camp Douglas as a training camp. In the fall of 1862, the Union Army used the facility as a detention camp for paroled Union Army prisoners pending their formal exchange for Confederate prisoners.

Camp Douglas became a permanent prisoner-of-war camp from January 1863 to the end of the war in May 1865. In the summer and fall of 1865, the camp served as a mustering out point for Union Army volunteer regiments. The camp was dismantled and the movable property was sold off late in the year. In the aftermath of the war, Camp Douglas eventually came to be noted for its poor conditions and death rate of between seventeen and twenty-three percent. Some 4,275 Confederate prisoners were known to be re-interred from the camp cemetery to a mass grave at Oak Woods Cemetery after the war.