Families offered new chance to reconnect with lost loved ones
New technology helping find thousands of Kiwis buried in unmarked graves, writes John Weekes.
For decades, grief tight.
When her son Matthias was stillborn in 1977, she got treatment typical of the time.
Soon after the tragedy, hospital staff started asking what she wanted to do with her baby’s body.
‘‘I actually never had a chance to go to his burial. I was still too ill in hospital.’’
Matthias was whisked away to Lower Hutt’s Taita Cemetery. Sue found herself in a world where new mothers crossed the road when they saw her.
‘‘It was very difficult and it was the way that they treated us in those days. That’s really the thing that hurt the most.’’
Many stillborn babies didn’t even get a grave of their own.
Data from 32 councils recorded at least 21,271 unmarked graves. There are an unknown number in dozens of other council graveyards, as well as church, tribal and private cemeteries.
In some towns, floods or fires destroyed records. Mass graves for paupers and stillborn babies were common.
Erratic record-keeping, and occasional neglect, meant some councils had no clue who was buried in their ground.
Tens of thousands of New Zealanders, including paupers and children who died from cot death, lie in unmarked or unknown graves, many in mass graves. Sue Main held her
But as attitudes to grief change and some councils use groundpenetrating radar or new software to better record graves, people like Main have found reconnecting with long-lost loved ones is possible, and meaningful.
Taita Cemetery is vast, but staff found Matthias’ resting place, despite an illegible gravestone, and tidied up his plot.
What does the new prove? gravestone ‘‘That he was loved.’’ That he meant something. In a small triangular area at Taita, some 51 square metres, as many as 1100 stillborn babies are buried.
‘‘The mothers never held them or saw them,’’ Shelley Donoghue of Hutt City council said.
Staff at Taita and Karori cemeteries have tracked down the resting places for people buried decades ago in unmarked graves.
‘‘I had an old lady who came in. She was very, very frail. She said ‘I’m dying, basically. My son has been on my mind every single day for my whole life’.’’
Donoghue, whose team is rolling out new, better record-keeping software, found the boy was in the mass grave. His mum came to visit. ‘‘She just bawled her eyes out.’’ But the overwhelmed mum also found some closure.
‘‘She liked the fact he was with so many other babies.’’
Andrea Todd lost her son to cot death in 1993 and set up SIDS and Kids New Zealand afterwards to help save babies.
She said even in the 1990s there was little help for mothers who lost babies to cot death. Common advice was still not much better than ‘‘get over it.’’
‘‘When my son died, there no information, no support.’’ here was I actually never had a chance to go to his burial. I was still too ill in hospital.
She said nowadays, many funeral directors had the knowhow to sensitively run memorial services for babies.
Years ago, mothers were told to leave their child ‘‘in the funeral home and then just forget it.
‘‘It doesn’t matter whether you’ve had a miscarriage, a still birth or a cot death. It’s hard no matter how you look at it.’’
Ashburton Cemetery had 1356 unmarked graves and 669 recorded as unknown. In Waihi, 248 graves were unmarked, 57 unknown.
At Manawatu’s Kelvin Grove Cemetery, records showed 595 people with a surname only. In Otorohanga, 14 graves of babies and children who died from 1936-1942 were unmarked.
Feilding alone had unmarked graves, 15 of paupers.
Napier’s paupers graves were also unmarked, and the cemetery had a community grave for victims of the 1931 earthquake.
Timaru District Council used ground penetrating radar in two cemeteries, indicating 970 graves of unknown people in Timaru and Geraldine.
In Wellington, others in unmarked graves were suicides, asylum patients and criminals deemed unworthy in bygone times of any memorial.
For years, it was normal for three paupers to share an unmarked grave, funeral director Simon Manning said.
But in the 1990s, funeral directors urged the council to have single graves for people.
‘‘We have come a long 325 them way.’’