Visiting the Island of the Dead - A Rare Visit to New York’s Potter’s Field on Hart Island

[LiberalElite]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/nyregion/on-hart-island-new-yorks-potters-field.html

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On Tuesday morning, the first snow flurries of the season fell on New York’s potter’s field, drifting down into an open trench, dusting the dirt next to hundreds of corpses in bare wooden caskets.

Here on a grassy expanse toward the south end of Hart Island, off the Bronx, the trenches are 10 feet deep and as long as a football field. They fill up steadily with the dead — the homeless, poor, stillborn and other unclaimed bodies — delivered by truck and ferry from all over New York City, for unceremonious interment.
-snip-

[yallerdawg]

1. This all sounded familiar...

[Historic NY]

2. Cemetery of the lost....

NY has some outdated archaic laws dealing with institution births and deaths. They cite privacy concerns, but what it really is, denial of those people searching for lost loved ones. I was threaten when I reconstructed a list of burials only identified by numbers.