Think-About-It Thursday

I will admit that unless you are willing to draw a long and circuitous line from the socks found in the tomb of Eleanor de Toledo and this post, it is entirely off topic. However, reading won't take but a minute, and if you decided to help that will cost you nothing and also take but a minute, so here I am in my bully pulpit, asking you to help get some people back in the ground. I have checked all this out with the woman running effort, actually speaking to her on the phone, so we know it is not a garbled internet story.

I am asking you all to take a moment and write a brief letter stating your support for the re-internment of human remains currently being held in storage in Brooklyn, NY.

The remains come from the cemetery of the former Quarantine Hospital on Staten Island used for immigrants as well as administering to anyone in the NYC metropolitan area with an infectious disease. The burials are from 1799-1858. At some point this cemetary had been paved over as a parking lot. In 2006, it was torn up and the bodies removed to a storage facility,

There is a cemetery which is willing to take these bodies, but the position of NYS is that "No one cares." Therefore they are doing nothing.

We have seen in recent years that when people do express support for the dignified treatment of human remains, the state is eventually forced to respond in some way. I ask that you do as I have done - just send a brief letter of support to the Staten Island Cemetery, email address SICemetery@aol.com, stating that you support the reinternment of these remains in a proper burial ground.

Staten Island Cemetery was once a burial ground of the Native American people, first recorded burial 1802. There are hundreds of veteran's from the Revolutionary war through WW1 interred at this historic location.

I have checked the facts with the woman who is chairing this effort, and have been assured that they are correct. The local genealogical community has been called upon to send letters of support, and we have. The more people who do so, not just locally but nationally and internationally, the more likely we are to get these people decently reburied.

I hope you will send a letter of support to SICemetery@aol.com, and thank you for your support of this effort. Regular mail address: Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries, Inc. S.I., 115 Lathrop Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10301, phone #917-545-3309