I got curious after watching ‘Village of the Damned’, when the kid walked into the graveyard looking for the stillborn child. I then started thinking, where do all the dead babies go? If they buried them, would’t our graveyards be full of tombstones saying ‘John Jacob Jingleheimer Shmit, Born July 23, 2000. Died, July 23, 2000’. Also, if they aren’t buried, where do they go?
I lived about a mile away from a cemetery for many years and there was a special section for the babies. And that is pretty much how the headstones looked. Born 7-24-2000 Died 7-24-2000. These graves stuck out particularly because they tended to have teddy bears and small toys put on them.
This cemetery was started about 1865 and the oldest graves were for a baby who died the day it was born and its 20 year old mother who died the next day.
The Irish countryside is littered with children’s graveyards, they are even marked as such on maps. I thing they come from the days when children that died before they were baptised were buried in a seperate cemetary because they couldn’t be buried in a church graveyard.
People may have also buried their babies on their land rather than a communal graveyard
My brother’s last child died in utero about 2 weeks before his due date a couple of years ago. He was buried on my brother’s property in rural Colorado.
I walk in a national cemetery almost every day and there are many headstones like that. Usually they just have the single date.
Well, as an ex-Catholic I seem to remember dead babies went into Limbo, kind of like a Karmic waiting room (or maybe thats just for unbabitzed babies). Anyway, the church got rid of Limbo in the late sixties, so I suppose nowadays they just float around like abandoned balloons or plastic grocerey bags in the wind.