NYC creates website for searching Hart Island’s Potter’s Field cemetary

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    Cities all have their curiosities. One of NYC’s curiosities is Hart Island’s Potter’s Field cemetery, where the unclaimed dead are buried. More than 850,000 have been buried here since 1869. Hart Island is part of The Bronx, but its run by the NYC Department of Correction, which is pretty much a Queens thing.


    Source: GMAP

    From the NY Times:

    For more than a century, to be buried on Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx, was to be essentially forgotten.

    A man run over by a train with no family to claim his body. A homeless woman who froze to death on a bitterly cold winter’s night with no loved ones to find their way to her. A stillborn baby born to a woman who could not afford to pay for a burial. These are among the approximately 850,000 forlorn souls who since 1869 have been buried in the city’s potter’s field, a 101-acre cemetery just east of City Island.

    Now the City and the DOC has developed a website that provides information about some of the people buried on Hart Island.

    We gave it a try and found the site to be a bit awkward to use, but it does work. Oh, it only works with Internet Explorer (not Chrome, Firefox or other web browsers).

    NYC DOC Hart Island lookup service

     

    City Launches Online Database for Massive Hart Island Potter’s Field [DNAinfo]
    NYC creates searchable online database for its Potter’s Field [SI Live]

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