More and more people are just dying to get into cemeteries.
Twenty-something years ago, my Dad was on an ancestry kick and was hitting all the cemeteries he knew had relatives in them. At one, he went to talk to the curator(?) about other plots that might have other relatives and while he was looking through a map book, the curator kept asking more and more personal questions. Dad said later he felt like the guy was grilling him, possibly to send him bills for back services. I don’t totally discount his feeling; is anyone financially responsible for dead relatives upkeep 150 years post-burial?
I assume you mean for profit cemeteries. In West Virginia (city ordinances notwithstanding) there is no state law that says you cannot bury grandma on your back 40 acres. Now, when you sell the back 40 to someone else, who “owns” grandma’s remains?
Only two laws I can think of off the top of my head without research and that is the general law against the desecration of a grave, and the law which requires a property owner to grant reasonable access to cemeteries on private property for mourning, genealogical, or other peaceful purposes.
How do other states deal with the fact that if I want to dig up grandma to build a tool shed (or a multi-million dollar housing project) that I am not “desecrating” that grave?
Correct I was talking professionally owned cemeteries that sell lots to customers, which is where most people end up buried. Backyard family cemeteries have become very rare in the United States, and I believe many states do not allow them at all.
In OH if you sell plots to customers you have to set aside 10% of every sale and put into an Endowment Care Trust for the perpetual maintenance of the cemetery. The cemetery operator is disallowed from touching the principal, they can only withdraw interest and dividends.
Another factor is the presence of military veterans. A local mall was being developed and as they were clearing the furthest pieces of land the found a long lost cemetery. Turned out there were African American veterans from WW I buried there. No one in the community knew anything about it, there are no records and very little in the way of remaining headstones. Because of the veterans, the VA got involved and saw to it that the remains moved and properly interred.
There’s a chance the burial information has already been catalogued. Organizations like the DAR and local historical societies have been doing this for a long time.
San Francisco moved most of the cemeteries out, moved some of the stones and most of the bodies.
### Removing the Bodies
Exhumation and transportation of the bodies was a very sophisticated operation.
If the casket was in good shape, they moved it with the body. If the casket had deteriorated, the bones were placed in boxes. Remains were required to be brought by hearse on the same day as exhumation, says Svanevik. The Catholic Church also required a priest to witness the exhumation of any bodies from Calvary Cemetery.
"Condition of remains disinterred varied from ‘dust’ to almost perfectly embalmed bodies, the latter resulting from filling of cast-iron caskets with groundwater acting as a preservative,” wrote William Proctor, in a 1950 San Francisco Department of City Planning report. “The smell of death was often present, even though the remains had been laid to rest from thirty to seventy years previously,” the head of the disinterment told Proctor.
First there were a number of expulsions that began at the turn of the century and they continued again in the 1930’s and 1940’s until almost all cemeteries were eliminated within The City. Unclaimed headstones and monuments were recycled for building various seawalls, landfills and park gutters.
There have been attempts to impose a no-burials policy in parts of China. Even if accepted, that leaves the problem of what to do with all the existing buried remains. If you wait for a while, it’s all bones
and I assume it is technically possible to get rid of those too, if desired.
I think this hits at the heart of the OP’s question. In the year 3000, are people going to continue to respect this “perpetual” agreement and leave large tracts of valuable and useful land as nice little monuments to long deceased people? I think obviously not, that there is a point where you say that, as mean as it sounds, that you don’t even get your grave respected for all eternity. But then that just leaves us with a question of “how long” and “for what purpose.”
And if the answer, which I’ve heard before, is as long as people who knew the deceased might live, then you will have a fight with the genealogy people (who are not well funded of course) and the argument that you are destroying history for a trivial reason. After all, why should a McMansion take priority over the monument to the first settler in X area? And why should a grave take priority over my tool shed? Yeah, we can bury the guy “somewhere else” but that just delays the thing until there are no more somewhere elses.
The photo is I assume the Paris Catacombs. Google that for a fun-filled fact-finding deep dive.
(All the unhealthy graveyards/cemeteries in city limits were disinterred and the bones transferred to the limestone mines just outside of town - now deep inside Paris. Must-see tourist attraction if you visit Paris. Refreshingly cool on a boiling summer afternoon.)
I don’t think it’s really a matter of being nice or not. As I understand it these endowments eventually have legal title to the land, and without a fundamental shift in our system of laws you can’t just dispossess an owner of their land for the fuck of it. I suspect in many cases where largish cemeteries were built in areas that have become urban centers, they were frequently owned in a fairly informal way, possibly just the town itself just set aside a plot and started burying people back in the 19th century. More modern cemeteries are dissimilar from this in many ways, and the vast majority have already been built in more suburban areas where land isn’t nearly as dear.
This isn’t to say that I particularly expect any cemetery to last forever, forever is a long ass time. But I think modern cemeteries have multiple things that make them quite different from historical cemeteries that have been moved and built over:
Clear legal entity with title to the land
Not an “informal” cemetery set aside by people who founded the town or owned by a long defunct church
The modern digital age means unlike the past it is unlikely we ever lose record of who owns these cemeteries or that their provenance becomes murky, meaning more formal legal matters will likely have to be addressed in eventually moving or building over them.
As I mentioned I’m a little skeptical of these endowment trusts because I’m familiar with a lot of such vehicles that end up broke eventually, happens all the time. When that occurs years down the road and these cemeteries no longer have new plots to sell, the cemetery will fall into disrepair. If it is at all near valuable land, I think it would be at risk of some sort of eminent domain seizure which likely would be found justified due to the cemetery being a blight.
We have several instances here of burial grounds being emptied to make way for the construction of the railways in the 19th c. in London (and more recently for the Crossrail project in London).
If they are old enough (and some go back to the mediaeval period) they are subject to archaeological excavation as the skeletons can tell us something.
Bunhill Fields burial ground, just north of the City boundary, ceased burying in 1854 and is now a public garden maintained at public expense.
Quaker burying grounds, which tended to have no headstone at all, sometimes turn out to have been built over in later ages. One in what is now central St Albans is a public garden.
I’m not sure it would be such a good idea to convince the alternative to medicine crowd that human bones are an aphrodisiac (or a cure-all or whatever). I’m picturing…poachers.
He was. Probably not too surprising, though. While he was defeated and slain in a battle with the usurper Henry VII, who as part of his claim to the throne of course rejected somewhat the legitimacy of Richard as King, he was given a proper Christian burial. But he was not given the sort of burial typical of a King who had died and been succeeded by more normal heirs. It’s been said Henry VII paid for a small memorial stone and that it was still visible some 120 years later, but he was not seen as a particularly reputable King in the immediate aftermath of his death (and arguably has never been seen as such), and thus was not given a typical of the time King’s burial. Contrast this with the burial of Henry VII himself, Henry was a very wealthy man, and he commissioned a new chapel that was built on to Westminster Abbey–which is still extant today, the Henry VII Chapel. Henry was entombed there, as have been the bodies of a number of subsequent monarchs-- including three of his grandchildren who reigned–Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I–however, not Henry VII’s son Henry VIII, his burial is in the St George’s Chapel. Richard just being buried in a relatively common church graveyard put his burial place at much greater risk of falling into disrepair and eventually being built over–something that was common with graveyards all over Europe. Obviously the monarchs who went out of the world with more…respect and desire for heirs to venerate them, being entombed in royal vaults inside still standing Cathedrals/Chapels etc were at much lower risk of their bodies being “lost.”
Not quite. There were certainly elements of Richard III’s burial that were highly unusual. There was no coffin and the body was probably just dropped into a grave that was rather too small. Also, Greyfriars in Leicester was not an especially major friary and had no obvious royal associations. But it was hardly just an ordinary burial. It was located in the middle of the choir, arguably the most prestigious position, and the monument erected by Henry VII (almost certainly not what was visible in 1611) was not cheap. Everything therefore suggests that Henry wanted to give the appearance that he had given Richard a decent burial. Then there is the fact that the reason that the location was lost was not because it was a graveyard but rather because the church in which was located was demolished following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was not the only English royal tomb lost in that way.
Believing that their ancestors wouldn’t have wanted to abandon the land they worked to cultivate, the Dotson family insisted on keeping the matriarch and patriarch in their original burial spot…
The graves of Richard and Catherine Dotson, the farmers who originally owned the land and died in 1884 and 1877, sit on the edges of runways 10 and 28.
[NB: 10 and 28 are the same runway; just different directions.]
