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 le
ave.
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
On 08/25/15, Davis, Daniel (KYTC)<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Pre-contact cemeteries are usually deemed "archaeological sites" as are some of the historic period cemeteries we encounter. However, you can always find next-of-kin for prehistoric burials, through consultation and coordination with Tribal representatives.
The court provides authorization for an entity that has decided for any number of reasons to relocate a cemetery and typically doesn't rule on the morality of the choice, false or otherwise. I can say that the decision to relocate a cemetery is not entered into lightly and is often weighed against the cost of relocating the living, and when constructing a road, there may be little choice. In eastern Kentucky, for instance, family cemeteries are everywhere and attempting to correct deficiencies in a road that lead more people into a graveyard will sometimes push us into the choice of relocating those who are already in one.
This isn't theory to me, or rhetoric - this is something I deal with on a regular basis. The choice is typically that the needs of the living outweigh the needs of the dead.
-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: neglected burying grounds
Yea, which is my point. Arguably all precontact aboriginal cemeteries can be deemed "abandoned," as can the family cemeteries of all peoples and the churchyards of congregations long dissolved. These are monuments intended to persist in perpetuity. That a court can decide to move the remains is a reality, but that doesn't make it right. Avoiding the rhetorical tools used by developers and the courts to rationalize their actions helps keep us from falling into the trap of false choice.
Jim
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
On 08/25/15, Davis, Daniel (KYTC)<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Abandoned cemetery is legally correct. If the Transportation Cabinet or a city or a private individual is taking steps to relocate a historic cemetery for which no next-of-kin can be identified, the cemetery first must be declared abandoned by a court of competent jurisdiction.
Daniel B. Davis
Administrative Branch Manager, Cultural Resources Section Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Division of Environmental Analysis
200 Mero Street
Frankfort, KY 40622
(502) 564-7250 or (502) 782-5013
KYTC Archaeology and KYTC Cultural Historic
-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 7:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: neglected burying grounds
Nancy:
First, I prefer we dispense with the term "abandoned cemetery." As long as there are dead people there, they are doing their intended job. Abandoned is a word often used in justifying removal of a cemetery.
The problem we run into with cemetery restoration is in keeping them restored. That requires a plan and money, preferably in the form of an administered endowed fund that will generate at least 10 percent per year (not talking interest here, but investment, and not in a mutual fund) to cover the anticipated costs of summer mowing and occasional limbing and tree removal. Falling tree limbs are the principal hazzard to monuments in the Eastern US.
For a township or county, a network of non-profit organizations, each responsible for the administration of one or more cemeteries, coordinated by a central entity may be ideal. Local historical and genealogical societies would be best and their participation could even promote membership in their respective organizations.
I'd forgo geophysics and focus on mapping extant stones and fossae/mounds, and work on monument repair and resetting.
Jim
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
On 08/24/15, Nancy Dickinson<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I am involved with a committee that is beginning to look into maintaining local abandoned and/or neglected burying grounds and cemeteries in a town founded in 1640. Is there some protocol or a way to prioritize maintenance concerns?
So far, there is a professionally-prepared survey with metes and bounds, also noting headstone and present-day vegetation locations. Immediate concerns include fallen headstones, absence of fences as well as presence of trees and shrubs. Public/private partnerships are being looked into for funding and maintenance purposes.
All advice is welcome.
Thanks,
Nancy
Nancy Dickinson
Conservation Commission member
Town of Greenwich, Connecticut
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