St. Joseph Church, Lockport, IL

St. Joseph Church in Lockport, IL was founded in 1868 by German immigrants. There were few Polish families in this parish but is included here because it was my home parish and is part of my "family". The parish records don't start until 1874. There seemed to be a lot of crossover between St. Joseph and St. Alphonsus in Lemont. So, maybe the person you are looking for is in Lemont. Before St. Joseph's was established, the only other Catholic church in Lockport was St. Dennis-- another place to search out.

What drew people to this area? In addition to the Illinois & Michigan Canal, there were quarries nearby. During the 20th century, the Texaco oil refinery employed many. There was also work in industrial plants in Joliet. Before the 1960s, the area around the city of Lockport was largely rural. Indeed many of St. Joseph's parishioners were farmers. The 1960s and later saw much good farmland being used for building subdivisions.

St. Joseph Church did not have its own parish cemetery. Many were buried in St. Dennis' south cemetery and its north Calvary Cemetery. As noted above, some burials were conducted in St. Alphonsus' Cemetery in Lemont. When Resurrection Cemetery, a diocesan cemestery, in Romeoville opened, more burials there became common.

There were two volumes of deaths. The first volume is a general purpose register containing baptisms, marriages, and deaths covering 1874-1914. The second volume has deaths, confirmations, and stray records covering 1914-1952. The records were filmed by the Lockport Area Genealogical & Historical Society with the support of Ancestry. In fact, the images are accessible through the Ancestry website. Since these are not LDS images, the LDS Image column is a misnomer. It still has the same function of helping locate which image in the series contains the information. This sequence number does not correspond exactly to the image file name and is off by one image or so but it will get you close enough so you don't have to browse through every image.