granite marker at the site believed to be Point duSable's grave in the third St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery. In 2002 an archaeological investigation of the grave site was initiated by the African Scientific Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Researchers using a combination of ground-penetrating radar, surveys, and excavation of a area did not find any evidence of any burials at the supposed grave site, leading the archaeologists to conclude that Point duSable's remains may not have been reinterred from one of the two previous cemeteries. Theories and legends Early life Though there is little historical evidence regarding Point duSable's life before the 1770s, there are several theories and legends that give accounts of his early life. Writing in 1933, Quaife identified a French immigrant to Canada, Pierre Dandonneau, who acquired the title "Sieur deSable" and whose descendants were known by both the names Dandonneau and DuSable. Quaife was unable to find a direct link to Point duSable, but he identified descendants of Pierre Dandonneau as living around the Great Lakes region in Detroit, Mackinac, and St.Joseph. He speculated that Point duSable's father may have been a member of this family, while his mother was likely an enslaved woman. In 1951 Joseph Jeremie, a native of Haiti, published a pamphlet in which he said he was the great grandson of Point duSable. Based on family recollections and tombstone inscriptions, he claimed that Point duSable was born in Saint-Marc in what was then Saint Domingue, studied in France, and returned to Haiti to deal in coffee before traveling to French Louisiana. Historian and Point duSable biographer John F. Swenson has called these claims "elaborate, undocumented assertions... in a fanciful biography". Fiction In 1953 Shirley Graham drew from the work of Quaife and Jeremie in a historical novel about Point duSable. She described it as "not accurate history nor pure fiction", but rather "an imaginative interpretation of all the known facts". This book presented Point duSable as the son of the mate on a pirate ship, the Black Sea Gull, and a freedwoman called Suzanne. Despite lack of evidence and the continued debate about Point duSable's early life, parentage, and birthplace, this popular story has been repeated and widely presented as being definitive. Peoria In 1815 a land claim that had been submitted by Nicholas Jarrot to the land commissioners at Kaskaskia, Illinois Territory, was approved. In the claim Jarrot