Interesting debate here. I tend to agree with James Gibb when he
allowed: "If I bury family members in a small cemetery, then depart to
make a life elsewhere, I haven't abandoned my cemetery. It continues to
serve the purpose for which I intended it." It follows then that if the
property falls in disrepair it is being neglected as Daniel Davis mentioned.
The term "abandoned cemetery" seems to be used as a legal means to
re-purpose a property when the need arises.
Rich Green
Historic Archaeological Research
418 N. Main Street
Brownstown, IN 47220
Office: (812) 919-4122
Mobile: (765) 427-4082
On 8/25/2015 9:33 AM, Davis, Daniel (KYTC) wrote:
> If you bury your family members in a cemetery and move elsewhere and die and leave no living kin in the location of the cemetery, there is no one left to manage your family cemetery. It becomes overgrown and headstones are broken and displaced. In technical and legal terms, the cemetery has been abandoned by the living. Simply calling it neglected isn't correct - you may still have living relatives in the area who are just lazy and don't tend after the cemetery. That's neglect. Abandonment indicates that there is no living person in the area that can claim descent from the interred. We expend a great deal of effort in trying to find next-of-kin, even lazy ones.
>
> Removing all burials from a cemetery doesn't make that area an abandoned cemetery - it changes the purpose of the land and in all likelihood, makes it something else altogether (like a road, a neighborhood, a strip mall, a theme park, etc.). After all, it's not likely that a cemetery would be relocated without the need to re-purpose the land on which it was located.
>
> My point again is that roads are often widened or the geometrics of a curve revised or an intersection reconstructed because of an unsafe condition in an existing road that may have been built in the 1930s. Who needs the road? Anyone who might have been killed without that widening, or revision, or reconstruction.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim
> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 9:18 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: neglected burying grounds
>
> This isn't a theoretical point--at least not wholly so--for me either. I don't often deal with roads...I deal with developers planning residential and commercial subdivisions. They typically present the community with a two-option solution, when there are others such as changing the scale of the proposed development or not building at all on a particular parcel. They carefully use words to support their particular plan. As an analogy, consider realtors' use of the word 'home.' They say they sell homes, but they sell houses. 'Home' has more nuanced meanings and is best reserved for what families--even families of one--build. If I bury family members in a small cemetery, then depart to make a life elsewhere, I haven't abandoned my cemetery. It continues to serve the purpose for which I intended it. Do we have to build a road through it? Who actually needs that road? More often than not, special interests intent on development need the road. They build, they make money, they leave.
>
> I don't want to start an anti-development diatribe...I'm not anti-development...but communities and homeowners need to assert their rights and protect their property and cultural interests. Our profession, anthropologically based as it is, should help them. One way of doing that is to make sure we develop and use terms that are based in science, not commerce or law, and then insist on adherence to those terms in public discourse. I suggest we reserve the term 'abandoned cemetery' for those burial grounds from which an earnest effort has been made to remove all human remains. Neglected cemeteries are those for which no group or individual maintains the cemetery as originally intended. And this definition raises issues with those cemeteries that communities did not originally conceive as fenced and mowed, but as places in which their ancestors returned to the earth whence they came.
>
>
> James G. Gibb
> Gibb Archaeological Consulting
> 2554 Carrollton Road
> Annapolis, Maryland USA ?? 21403
> 443.482.9593 (Land) 410.693.3847 (Cell)
> www.gibbarchaeology.net ? www.porttobacco.blogspot.com
>
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