The Byrkit Burial Yard — the settler ground in the west

nineteenth century

The township's oldest burial record on Osceola's side is a family's. At 41.67403 north, 86.09984 west, near Cedar Road and Riverview Drive in the township's west — unincorporated ground's test — the federal names record seats Byrkit Cemetery, the burial yard of the Byrkit settlers whose name runs through the Story of Osceola section and People legs from the settlement's first decade. The ground's reading opens the DAR's third volume of county cemetery records — its heading digitized as "BYRKSYS BURIAL YARD" — and the reading as digitized is badly damaged: the optical text garbles names and dates past safe quotation, though its legible core carries a James Byrket carried to 1864 and West burials whose births reach back into the 1770s, a depth consistent with a yard laid out by the first settler generation for its own dead. This section prints the yard's existence, its seat, its reading, and its family's place in the settlement, and prints nothing from the damaged text as fact; the page image of the DAR volume is named below as the settler for the reading's contents. A family yard of this kind had no association and no sexton but the family; its course is the family's course, and when the family's burials moved to the public grounds, the yard closed — the record reached does not date the last burial, and none is invented.

Sources

1. GraveRoots, Penn Township list (the seat near Cedar Road and Riverview Drive).
2. Daughters of the American Revolution, Schuyler Colfax Chapter, St. Joseph County, Indiana Cemetery Records, vol. III (the Byrkit reading, at damaged-OCR strength; Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection, Allen County Public Library).
4. Spine and People legs (the Byrkit settlers).