Pamela Bannos launched her project Wednesday. It's called "Hidden Truths". Historical markers are going up around Lincoln Park to inform visitors about the park's past.
Before Lincoln Park was created in 1865 the land was a cemetery. The northwestern University lecturer claims that all of the bodies were never removed. She estimates there are as many as 10,000 skeletal remains in Lincoln Park today.
"It wasn't like the systematic thing that the city did and the Lincoln Park commissioners did, which was to remove all of the graves, and it became complicated because people owned all these plots of land," Bannos said. "And so they actually held title to this land, and so it was the families, the individuals' responsibility for getting their own family out. And, so if they didn't come forward, the body didn't get removed."
For the past 15 months Bannos has been researching city records once thought to be lost in the Great Chicago Fire.
