Explain this headstone to me

I was at the cemetary today and was wandering around some of the new gravesites and headstones and ran across this odd one and have no idea what it means:


   Roberta J Lukanen
            -STILL-
          RITUALLY
        MUTILATED

July 19, 1945 -


Looks like she hasn’t passed away yet but got the headstone ahead of time.
I know about the controversial female ritual mutilations in other countries and maybe she was affected by this but it seems a very odd thing (and the only thing) to put on a headstone.

Any insight?

Possibly it means she was stillborn? Does any culture ritually mutilate stillborn children?

Is she the same person who shows up in this record of amateur radio operator licenses? I guess you could contact her and ask, but I’d be too weirded out to actually do it.

I thought about the stillborn part but I looked her name up and she still lives at a local address.

I believe that’s her. She lives in St.Louis Park and the cemetary is in Brooklyn Center about 10 miles away.

When we were down at my parents’ house in Fernandina Beach, we looked around the cemeteries and found a Charles Angel, Assassinated (date) - I think the date was something like 1895 or so. We never did find out what was up with that.

Her DOB is just post WWII, name sounds German. The name may not be the one she was born with. Possibly caught in the recriminations (on her family) that followed, like Anastasia?

I’m dying to know. Please, please, ask her!

Not much out there. I found this:

I wonder if anyone could search newspapers from Amelia Island around that timeframe?

I don’t know if this adds anything to the discussion, but from reading newspaper accounts from around 1865, “assassinated” seems to be sometimes synonymous with the more mundane “murdered.” Also, several newspaper accounts from that time used “assassination” for attempted murder, not necessarily the actual death itself, such as, “So-and-so assassinated, but expected to survive.” I had to read it a couple of times the first time I saw it.

We meant to ask them at the local history museum, but we forgot about it.

I wold bet the caretaker of the cemetery knows the story.

Looks to me like a Finnish name, personally, possibly a corruption of Liikanen.

One of my favorite websites. They have a link to here, which has free, searchable archives of some Florida papers.

I frequently get sucked in to hours of meandering through those old newspapers.

Well, about the only thing that pops to mind would be if she was actually born into a group that practiced female circumcision. Because someone was born Roberta Mgabe doesnt mean she couldnt have married some guy named Lukanen and emmigrated.

Although … are not jews forbidden to be tattooed? and couldnt she be a survivor of one of the camps, and hence ‘ritually unclean’ because of the tat?

Could it be that she is some kind of activist against ritual mutilation? And wanted her tombstone to bear a message about it? Like, “Women are STILL ritually mutilated” - which would explain the “STILL” part. She wanted to spread this message even after she was dead?

Not if she was born in July of 1945, which is a couple months after V-E Day.

If she is some kind of activist then she’s a pretty stupid one because her message is too vague to convey meaning even under close scrutiny. Maybe she’s with PETA and she has something against wool? MUTilated, MUTtin? etc?

The idea that Jews with tattoos can’t be buried in Jewish cemeteries is a myth. (Tattoos aren’t permitted by Jewish law, but that has nothing to do with ritual uncleanliness, and anyway, ritual uncleanliness is mostly irrelevant since the destruction of the Temple two millenia ago.) Also, in Jewish law, one is not held responsible for acts committed against one’s will, like being tattooed by Nazis.

I was walking at the Crystal lake Cemetery and a grave marker caught my eye as it had so much writing on it:

The Censored Marker of
ROBERTA J. LUKANEN
Can be viewed at
MOUND CEMETERY
69th Avenue North at Palmer Lake Drive
Brooklyn Center, Minn.
Section 3 Block 18 Lot 1 Grave 2

I will be checking this out. More to come.