Genealogy Forum NEWS
December, 1998
RANDOM THOUGHTS I
A Grave Mistake
Forwarded by GFS Palmina@aol.com
by Amy Westfeldt
Associated Press
NEWARK NJ - Lot 5, Block 5080. Anna Lascurain looked at her tax map once again, checking the address for the triangular sliver of land that the map-maker had marked with crosses. This couldn't be the place, Yet the map said it was.
She eyed the mounds of dirt, the asphalt, the piles of old tires. There were stones, but not the kind she was looking for. They were chunks of concrete, chipped bricks, jagged rocks. They sat amid leaking oil cans, Cheez Doodles wrappers, a sneaker.
For more than a year, Lascurain had searched for City Cemetery, the potter's field that held the remains of 18,000 people without funds or family to pay for burial.
The first bodies went into the ground in 1869, the last in 1954. Among them was George Spade, a penniless tanner shot to death in 1921 by his third wife. The city buried him on the tidy, 5.2 acre cemetery and assigned him, like the others, a stick and a number.
His daughter, Elsie, who is Anna Lascurain's mother, never knew where he was buried. She was 7 and in foster care when Spade died at age 41. She has no photographs, only a few memories: him swinging her onto his shoulders at a Jersey City parade, him revealing the picture of her he kept inside of a gold watch.
It took Elsie years to find the death certificate. By then, no one had heard of City Cemetery. So Anna turned to tax maps. Finally she found what she was looking for. But she didn't know how to tell her mother. In the end, she just showed her - brought her to a dirty, forlorn section of the city, a patch surrounded by highway, by the railroad tracks of the busy Northeast Corridor and by the Anheuser-Busch brewery.
Elsie Lascurain let out a sob, grabbed her daughter's arm and nearly fell to her knees. "Oh my God," she said. "Look what they did to my father."
There are stories centuries old of cities building atop potters fields. In 1888, the city reburied bodies from a potters field in what is now downtown Newark. Washington Square Park and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel are both former grave sites for thousands of New York City's poor. But historians can't remember a cemetery under garbage.
"It's very sort of outside the American culture to let a cemetery like that totally disappear," said David Sloan, author of "The Last Great Necessity" a history of
U. S. cemeteries. "It reflects on how the memory of those people was so easily disposed of."
City officials won't talk now about the trashing of the 129-year old City Cemetery. In court documents, they say they don't know exactly where the bodies are. No burial records, no maps, no names.
But no one has denied the story told by the state attorney general's office and Mrs. Lascurain, who has sued the city and demands it remove the garbage in a restoration that will likely cost millions, a restoration that the city has agreed to carry out.
In the decades since 1954, Newark turned its potter's field into a dump. In the 1960's it began using the land for storage, and since 1975 it leased part of the land to an industrial supply company, lawyers for Lascurain and the state say.
When the deputy attorney general, Nancy Costello Miller, visited the cemetery this summer, she saw large piles of tires, a dumpster, abandoned single story buildings and other debris. A sanitation truck drove onto the grounds while she was there.
"There was no indication at the site that the area had ever been a cemetery," Miller wrote to city attorneys. That explains why Jean Voltz of Nutley could never find it.
She searched for years circling Routes 1 and 9 looking for Bessemer Street, where the cemetery is listed on recent road maps. Nothing looked even vaguely like a cemetery. "Horrible," she siad when she learned - and saw - what had become of it. "At least in a vandalized, overgrown cemetery, you do know that it was a cemetery."
Voltz' maternal grandfather, Charles Arnold is buried in City Cemetery, killed in a fall during a construction accident in 1902. Voltz has traced her mother's family to Wales in the 1600's, documenting their burials. Arnold, she said "is one of the relatives that I have not found yet."
Voltz told her friend, Betty Johnston about City Cemetery. Johnson had been searching since the 1980's for the resting place of her grandfather, Edward Peale, a laborer who died of pneumonia in a mental institution in 1909. Johnson traveled from her home in Wantage (NY) to Newark's City Hall, asking for directions.
"They didn't know anything about Newark City Cemetery," she said. Others with relatives in City Cemetery have similar stories, saying the city misled them or just never heard of the burial ground.
Without official burial records, lawyers and investigators rely on newspapers and history books to tell City Cemetery's story. The city bought a 15-acre property in 1865. Keeping five acres for a potter's field, it sold the rest in 1903 to a railroad. Historians speculate that bodies had been buried in the portion the city sold.
By 1923, 14,000 bodies had been buried on the remaing patch of land, according to an article in the Newark Sunday Call. In 1953, the city proposed burying its dead in private plots. It called the potters field desirable for development. The 1966 newspaper said the cemetery had been used as a storage yard for six years.
In 1975, the Newark City Council voted to lease part of the cemetery to Kingsland Drum and Barrel Co. Inc., also a defendant in the Lascurain lawsuit. Lascurain's lawyers want to include members of that council of 23 years ago as defendants. Among them is Sharpe James, who today is Newark's mayor.
Lawyers say that without city curial records it is unlikely anyone could exhume bodies for reburial now. A geological firm hired by the city plans to use the ground-penetrating radar to identify bones.
Thought the city has no records, Geta Spatola O'Connor does. The funeral director leafs through three leather-bound ledgers she has kept for nearly 50 years. In careful penmanship are the records of perhaps 1,000 bodies interred in City Cemetery between 1949 and 1954.
There are names, birth dates. There are places of death: "Sudden in rooming house," Sudden in hotel." There are causes of death: "Cerebral Thrombosis."
Her father, George Spatola, was hired in 1948 to manage the potter's field. The city paid him $44 per burial, $30 for babies. When a poor person died, Spatola would send a hearse to pick up the remains. Each body was covered in an embossed gray cloth and placed into a wooden coffin. And after Spatola took over the cemetery, each body was accompanied by an 18-inch, gray metal marker bearing the name of the dead.
George Spatola did more than that. He set to making the place human. He named the cemetery Floral Rest and had the city build an arch, add shrubbery, erect a flagpole. It looked, Spatola O'Connor said, like a cemetery - and certainly not like it does now. "My dad really tried to give those poor souls some dignity by giving them a name," she said. "If he were alive, he would just be horrified."
Lawyers for Lascurain initially wanted the city to restore the10-acre plot that was sold to the railroad in 1903. It is now partially covered by railroad tracks that carry freight and people up and down the East Coast.
But Superior Court Judge Julio Fuentes has rejected that plan; he says there's not enought evidence that bodies were buried there.
Joan Geismar, an urban archaeologist, disagrees. Four years ago, in a feasibility study for a transportation project, she concluded that bodies are probably on that property, perhaps directly under the railroad.
Lascurain hasn't reutrned to her father's resting place since that day she visited with her mother. She just can't. "I get nightmares. The dirt and stuff, that's all I see." she says. "Eighteen thousand people there, all under garbage."
Developer Demolishing A Family Burial Plot Forwarded by GFA Robin@aol.com
Please take a look at the following article. It is about one woman's fight against a developer, who is demolishing a family burial plot, and disregarding a legal deed that provided for the plot forever... I'm not sure what any of us can do to help, but in spreading the word we may find some help for her. I have her e-mail address if someone can help.
This letter should be forwarded to everyone you can think of. Our cemeteries all over are in danger and this must be stopped.
Here is a copy of what I sent to the e-mail address at the bottom of the article. Feel free to use any or all of it in your own letters.
Dear Sir,
I am writing this letter to express my concern for the cemetery that is being destroyed, all in the name of progress. Much like the Native American Burial grounds and the graves of famous Americans are protected from such monstrosities, so should all family cemeteries be. These small cemeteries are a part of our past, our heritage. They teach and educate us as to who we are and where we came from. Destroying these cemeteries is the same as destroying the rich history buried within and making these founders of America seem unimportant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each of our ancestors played an important part in making America what it is today. While they may not rank as "famous", their roles in America were the ones that helped the "famous" Americans become what they were/are. All of the great Americans came from humble beginnings and these are the people that are buried in the cemeteries that are being or may be destroyed in the future. They should be as respected in death as they were in life.
Please send this to the appropriate parties involved in this case, or provide me with the names and addresses of whom I should send this.
Thank you for your time.
Robin Helman
http://www.sunherald.com/news/docs/grave101898.htm
(Link no longer valid 2005)
Government Provides Vets' Headstones Forwarded by GFL George@aol.com
(c) The Associated Press
By HANNAH WOLFSON
Copyright 1998 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without prior written authority of The Associated Press.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- A polished new headstone stands by two worn markers in a tiny private cemetery, a tribute to the man whose gravesite it marks and a federal program that tries to ensure that no veteran's grave goes unmarked.
John Alford was a Revolutionary War veteran from Virginia who died in Nashville on April 24, 1837. Though he served in the military more than 200 years ago, his family still was eligible for a government headstone through the National Cemetery System, the section of the Department of Veterans Affairs that maintains 115 national cemeteries.
Steven Westerfeld, a spokesman for the system, said a gravestone can be the most significant benefit a veteran receives.
``These are people who fought for our country and we owe a great debt of gratitude for that and it behooves us to make sure that they are not forgotten,'' Westerfeld said. ``And one way we can do that is by providing a headstone or marker for them.''
The VA provided about 270,000 headstones last year. Though most of the markers go to recently deceased veterans, the tombstone and marker project also provides stones to replace those that have been lost, damaged or destroyed.
Jane Alford found John Alford's stone was crumbling when her genealogy research led her to the tiny cemetery on the lawn of a historic home on the outskirts of Nashville.
``His wife's grave was there, and one of his daughters'. These two were left, but his was missing,'' said Alford, who lives in Lewisburg, about 60 miles south of Nashville.
John Alford, her husband's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, joined the Army in Virginia and guarded British prisoners of war. When the revolution ended, he received land in Tennessee in exchange for his military service and moved there.
While researching his background, Jane Alford learned about the headstone program, which requires documentation of a veteran's service.
It takes about a year for a headstone, valued at about $350, to be carved and shipped. Families may choose either granite or marble headstones, or a brass marker. And the headstone or marker may be upright or flat.
Alford and other descendants of John Alford from Tennessee, Indiana, North Carolina and Alabama gathered recently for a ceremony when the new stone was set.
``We just didn't want to lose this track, this trace of a person,'' Alford said. ``It felt like he meant a lot to us so we just decided we wanted to do it.''
To apply for a headstone, contact Memorial Programs Services at 800-697-6947.
AP-NY-11-18-98 1203EST
The Letter Home
By William D. Hocutt, BHocutt@aol.com
Hi Mom
Just a short Note to give you some good news. My commander has approved my leave and I should be home for Christmas this year.
Mom, I have to tell you these Hawaiian Islands are as pretty as a pitchure and people are just as nice as they can be. I'm gonna bring you some sugar cane and a pineapple. I really like it here, but I shore do miss Texas. I'm really looking forward to a big bowl of your Chicken and Dumplins.
Tell Hiram I miss him, even if he is the craziest little brother in the world. Tell him to tell Big Bobby I got the answer to his question about them grass skirts.
Momma, I got promoted, I am a Seaman 1st Class now on the best Battleship in the whole Navy, but please don't worry. I think Daddy is wrong, I don't think there is gonna be a war. Just think about it, that war is plumb over in Europe it wont ever affect us. Although to be honest if what Mr. Winchell is saying on the radio is true, you just gotta admire those British folkes. I'd be proud to help em and I would sorta like to see London. When Daddy got back from the Great War he said it was a pretty town with a big ole Castle right in the middle of it. Maybe I could get to meet the King and invite him over to eat your Sunday fried Chicken (Ha Ha).
I gotta close now and get it in the mail. Love Ya.
Seaman 1st Class Joesph J Traywick
USS Arizona
5 Dec 1941
Dear Mrs. Traywick:
I regret to inform you that your son was Killed in Action on the morning of December 7th 1941 during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Sincerely Yours
Franklin Delanor Roosevelt
President, United States of America
LEST WE FORGET
For Further Reading
Editorial Staff. Historical Societies of Oregon. Resource Center, Golden Gates Genealogy Forum. 8 Feb 1996.
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