What Happens to the Unclaimed Dead?

When people die without family, or without identification, their local government lays them to rest. Learn about these fascinating traditions and how they've developed over the centuries in this episode of BrainStuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vogele bam here. Have you ever wondered how cities
deal with the bodies of the unclaimed dead, including the homeless, unidentified,
and unknown. Don't feel weird for being a little bit morbid.
Cities have always had a protocol for making sure everyone,
even the nameless and faceless, has an eternal resting place.

(00:24):
In Biblical times and before refrigeration or embalming, the dead
had to be buried as quickly as possible. All bodies
went into the same burial ground. We spoke with cemetery
writer Lauren Rhodes. She said, if you were part of
the community, you were buried together. If you were a
stranger or traveling through or whatever, you got the outskirts
of the burial ground. That practice continued into medieval Europe.

(00:45):
American cemeteries started taking shape in the sixteen twenties in
New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement that eventually became New York City.
Burial grounds at churches there designated separate land for strangers.
Rhodes says these New Amsterdam cemeteries are the first accounts
she was found in the United States of potter's fields
burial places for people who remained unclaimed, usually because they

(01:06):
were unidentified or didn't have enough money for a cemetery plot.
She said they were drawing a distinction between the people
that belonged and the people that didn't belong. In a
potter's field, the city paid for the burial of the dead.
The term originates from the Gospel of Matthew, part of
the New Testament, when the high priests of Jerusalem paid
for a burial place for strangers and the poor. Rhodes said,

(01:27):
when the city buries you, they bury you at the
least possible expense, And so the grave isn't all that deep,
the coffin's not very nice. If there's a marker, it's
the cheapest possible marker. So anybody who could afford it
would choose to be buried in a cemetery rather than
the potter's field. Every city had a potter's field, but
many details and laws rely on the given place. In

(01:48):
some cities, the wait until a person was buried could
depend on something as mundane as the cabinet maker's schedule.
Creation wasn't popular, so everyone was buried. The cabinet makers
also worked as coffin makers, so burial been as soon
as they could finish a coffin. In other places, cities
skipped the coffin and instead wrapped bodies in a sheet,
though that changed around the mid nineteenth century. Most cities

(02:09):
switched from burying their dead in Potter's fields to cremating
bodies by the mid twentieth century. Today, almost every city
in the US cremates unclaimed people, and Potter's field burials
have fallen out of use. As Rhodes said, it's a
whole lot cheaper to put an urn on a shelf
than it is to bury a body. However, New York
City is rare to this day. The city fairies unclaimed

(02:30):
bodies in pine coffins to Heart Island, an uninhabited island
with a Potter's Field of more than one million people.
Cities have deals with local funeral homes to handle unclaimed
bodies after cremation. Every city has different rules for how
it handles remains. Los Angeles County, for example, stores them
for three years and buries them in a mass grave
if they go unclaimed. Finding people in Potter's fields can

(02:52):
get tricky. Cities don't usually pay for markers, so Potter's
Fields are mostly filled with unmarked graves. If you think
you know someone who might be buried by the city,
Roads advises you go to the city and request the
death certificate, which should say where the body ended up
if the city handled it. Some of those records are online.
Of course, you first have to know where a person died,
and if a person dies without identification, that can easily

(03:14):
create a situation where a city ends up with a
Jane or John Doe. Rhodes said, it's really easy to
slip through the cracks if you're elderly, and if you
have a heart attack on the street or something like that,
or if somebody robs your body and you've never been
arrested or fingerprinted, it's really hard for them to know
who you are unless somebody can recognize you. At the
Potter's Field in New York City, the Heart Island Project
strives to create a map and listing of the sixty

(03:37):
seven thousand and four people who have been buried there since.
Not Unlike other cemeteries across the country, Potter's fields also
speak to the shaky ground that cemeteries are built on. Literally,
many Potter's Fields have been moved or have had other
structures built on top of them in the name of progress.
Even cemeteries full of markers have met this fate. In
New Orleans, two of the Mercedes ben Superdomes parking garage

(04:00):
sit atop an old Protestant cemetery. The remains removed and relocated.
Graves and remains were also moved in Fremont, California, in
the San Francisco Bay Area for a new housing tract.
Rhodes said, we think of cemeteries as permanent and monumental,
and they're not. They're really fragile, and all it takes
as an earthquaker, hurricane, and the monuments are all damaged

(04:20):
and they're really expensive to repair. It's easier to take
them down than to fix them, and that history is
just lost. Today's episode was written by A. Dina Solomon
and produced by Tristan McNeil. Rhod's latest book, By the Way,
is one and Cemeteries to See Before You Die. Check
it out, and for more on this and lots of

(04:42):
others slightly morbid but entirely interesting topics, visit our home
planet how Stuff Works dot Com.