Paupers' graveyard a challenge to navigate
Historian says it's not surprising finding Jane Doe took 2 triesBy BLEYS W. ROSE THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
There are only two unidentified women in a paupers' graveyard in Santa Rosa, buried side by side after having died in the late 1960s, according to local cemetery historian Jeremy Nichols. Mystery has surrounded the remains of a "Jane Doe" that the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department dug up Thursday. Nichols, president of the Sonoma County Historical Society, said the county has buried about 500 bodies over the past 60 years in a forlorn swale of land between Santa Rosa's Memorial Park and the Rural Cemetery.
"It is no wonder that investigators had a difficult time finding the right Jane Doe because both records and the cemetery are not well organized," Nichols said. He has recently published a book, "Potter's Field," about the county's burial practices for indigents that notes the lowland downhill from the Rural Cemetery periodically floods, and plot markers with few names or identification symbols often shift.
Many plot markers are little more than concrete cylinders formed from coffee-can molds.
A team from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and a group of anthropology students from San Francisco State University unearthed the wrong Jane Doe on Wednesday. But on Thursday, they found the coffin they were seeking after shifting their digging operation to a nearby plot. Sheriff's officials have been tight-lipped about revealing what "new information" prompted them to unearth the body of an unidentified woman buried some 40 years ago. Speculation centers on whether a confession has come to light, but authorities have declined to provide details beyond saying the woman was buried sometime in the 1960s. Nichols said information gleaned from his book research verified that there are two unidentified women listed as Jane Doe buried side by side in the center of the graveyard. Although he said he has not been contacted by authorities, he hesitated to provide further burial information because he didn't want to jeopardize what may be a criminal investigation. Both women were buried in the late 1960s, within about two years of each other, he confirmed.
Nichols' book centers on identification of indigents buried at the Chanate Historic Cemetery located across the street from what's now Sutter Medical Center. But, he said, his research also led him to the almost inaccessible 3-acre parcel downhill from the Rural Cemetery purchased by Sonoma County in 1944.
About that time, indigent burials ceased at the Chanate cemetery and internments started at the newly purchased site.
"It still doesn't even have a name, and the county land doesn't belong to the Rural Cemetery or to Santa Rosa Memorial Park," Nichols said. "It is like the sister who marries out of the family church and is never spoken of again."
Nichols said the first mention in public records of the new cemetery for indigents was in Board of Supervisors minutes of 1945 when "someone complained that whoever was doing the burials wasn't keeping good records." "The find of the century was the record I found in Salt Lake City, probably written by the county coroner, that listed all the names of indigents from 1937 buried by the county, where they were buried, which funeral homes handled the body and how much the county paid," Nichols said. He said the records he discovered at the Family History Library at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were not duplicates of anything he could find in Sonoma County.
Evergreen Cemetery is a historic African-American cemetery in the East End of Richmond, Virginia dating from 1891. Notable African-American Richmonders including Maggie L. Walker, John Mitchell, Jr., A.D.Price, and Rev.J.Andrew Bowler are buried there. Much of the privately-owned cemetery is completely overgrown with kudzu or is returning to forest. The original organization responsible for the cemetery, the Evergreen Cemetery Association, made no allowances for perpetual care in its charter. In 1970, the association sold its more than 5,000 plots to Metropolitan Memorial Services, which soon went bankrupt. Although listed on the State & National registers of historic places this privately owned cemetery has been abandoned for years.
