![]() ‘When I went out Monday, they told me that my father was clear over in another section of the cemetery, and yesterday he was back near my uncle,’ she said. They were placed side by side in the shade of a tall tree, she said.īrown said that the records at Eastern ‘are definitely fouled up’ and that the cemetery’s card file didn’t list either her uncle or father until after she complained. When the reporter asked to see the graves, Alexander, the corporation’s executive director, showed him a third site.Īlexander explained the discrepancies by saying that ‘many people forget what a cemetery looks like and really don’t know for sure where graves are at.’Įugenia Brown said she is positive about where she buried her uncle in 1960 and her father in 1968. The sisters told a report where the brothers were supposed to be buried, and also where Palmer was told to go by cemetery officials during a recent visit. Lula Wiesmann, 78, corroborated her sister’s story, as did a third sister, Rebecca Dunn. ![]() Palmer, 66, said last month that Eastern Cemetery’s records are ‘incorrect, because they’re telling me my brothers are buried in one place and I know they’re in another.’ ‘I know where my brothers are supposed to be, but they’re not there.’ ‘My father, mother and my brother are all buried there, and I found them without problems,’ she said. She said she’s visited them ‘many, may times’ and ‘I know what I’m talking about.’ Some survivors of those buried in the cemeteries are resigned to the possibility that family remains may be lost forever.Īnne Palmer went to Eastern Cemetery early this year to see the unmarked graves of her brothers, who were buried in 1918 after dying during an influenza epidemic. a horrible thing to bury somebody in someone else’s grave,’ Dudgeon said. Worse still, she said, is that an indictment returned Friday says the skeletal remains taken when her husband’s grave was dug were distributed ‘on the surface of various graves and in a storage vault.’ Myrtle Dudgeon is ‘simply horrified’ by the thought that her husband, James, was buried in another person’s grave at Eastern Cemetery in Louisville on May 31. The Courier Journal, Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky The cemetery is not regularly maintained, only volunteers care for it now. And the further back you drove, the worse it looked. When we visited Eastern Cemetery, it was very depressing to see so many stones overturned and broken. This is so heartbreaking for family members and genealogists. This led me to more research and finding this article in the 1989 Courier Journal. When Ritchey and I attended the Kentucky History and Genealogy Conference at the Louisville Free Public Library in August of 2017 I listened to Phil DiBlasi, the Staff Archaeologist at the University of Louisville talk about 19 th and 20 th century burial practices, but he also spoke about the problems at Eastern Cemetery and gave just a bit of information on it. And the containers of human remains were not always buried deep enough – especially infant remains. One could hold any number of heads, arms or legs. It has been said that although each box was to hold a full body that was not always the case. Legally, the body is to be buried – or cremated – intact. There are the more grisly aspects of bodies that were donated to science. Shortly after that time the cemetery ownership began to reuse graves over and over. The cholera epidemic of 1880 also caused a large number of people dying within a short amount of time and burials needed quickly. For the many who came through Louisville and Jefferson County in those days, those who died without funds for a proper burial, probably came to their end in a pauper’s grave. There are stories from as long ago as the 1850’s when bodies were buried in mass pauper’s graves, which, to be truthful, was not illegal at that time. There have been many rumors over the years about what was going on in Eastern Cemetery, how rules were broken, and families should be concerned if their loved ones were buried in the correct graves – or who else may be buried there with them. This cemetery is beside the much larger Cave Hill Cemetery, both located on Baxter Avenue in Louisville, Jefferson County. Ritchey and I were there around the first of October of last year Linton and I came again the first of December. I have been to Eastern Cemetery in Louisville twice within a two-month time period. By Kentucky Kindred Genealogical Research on Ap
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