BRONX: Hart Island

MAY CONTAIN JEWISH BURIALS: "On Hart Island, in the east of the Bronx lays a public cemetery where one million people have been buried-one of the largest cemeteries in the US-but visiting is prohibited. The cemetery has been in existence since 1869 and bodies are buried three coffins-deep. Buried there are still-born babies, the homeless, the poor and the unclaimed. Small white posts in the ground mark each 150 adult bodies. A thousand children and infants are buried together per grave. Approximately 1,500 people are buried there annually. It is forbidden to photograph the cemetery and it is run by the Department of Corrections. Records of those buried there are "sketchy" at best- they have been lost or burned and the Department of Corrections says they don't have the infrastructure to permit visitors or maintain files. The Hart Island Project (http://hartisland.net/) recently acquired a map of intact mass burials and GPS location information. The site has a registration of deaths, to access it one must register and subscribe to access -there is a subscription fee that is used to maintain the website. Subscriptions are for two months paid in two automatic withdrawals for $15 from your PayPal account. The database covers public burials in New York City from 1980 through December 2011 only. Over 60,500 burials are listed in the database.If you are looking for a later burial once you are subscribed you can request assistance with a custom burial. The burial records are transcribed from documents provided by the New York City Department of Correction. According to an article on Yahoo, a bill has been introduced in the New York City Council to transfer the island to the parks administration, but no hearing has yet been scheduled. Source: Jan Meisels Allen on JewishGen Digest [Apr 2014]