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Remembering Our Dead
The importance of family connection
Lost graveyards, Unnamed graves, State graves, Forgotten graves!
Central State Hospital, Milledgeville, Georgia; a "State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, was once the largest mental institution in America, 25,000 patients on 10,000 acres, unusual for a small southern town. Of those patients, thousands were buried on state land, not suitable for farming or building, in graves identified by numbered stakes, to facilitate patient confidentiality. Due to poor record keeping, many names to match numbers are missing. Today, these graves are forgotten and over-looked. Maintenance and upkeep, these people were devalued all their lives, therefore have not been afforded dignity at death.
More than a hundred thousand lie in unnamed graves across America. today.msnbc
While on the subject of fixing the system, we are good at many things; but preserving the memory, care and maintenance of our dead, are probably some of our worse areas. The goal in our after death experience is to immortalize family members and loved ones. So far, this privilege is mostly afforded to celebrities. However, all people are indispensable and deserving immortality.
We immortalize our dearly departed in stone, but it is not long before they are gone from our lives and memory and that creates a great family disconnect and/or a dead end in family history .
The government tracks us from birth to death, but after death, tracking our dead is left totally up to family members? Forgotten, over-looked and devalued are some words that soon can be used to describe them, Why?
What happens to our family tree? Our after death procedures fail us. Our families and our government place a higher priority on tracking real-estate than we do family history.
More forgotten graves, Indian sacred grounds and slave graves all across our nation. If there are more than a hundred thousand unnamed patient graves, then one can only imagine how many more unnamed graves there are, establishing a major disconnection? There are no means of identification, purposefully, their identities can never be tracked nor traced, their bodies are in numbers too great to count and locations too varied to find.
We do not have nor keep good records. People who lay down their lives are indispensable. What can we do about that so "anyone" can look back and see the work "they" and "we" have done? A voice from a people who can not speak for themselves. Your inner voice.com
