Today we bring you this story that broke earlier this week out of West Seneca, New York.  It deals with the movement of about 220 buried caskets from one part of a cemetery to another part of that same cemetery.  You can see a story and news video about this from WKBW of Buffalo here.

From what we can tell, it appears that a portion of the bank along the Cayuga Creek, where the St. Matthews Cemetery sits, began to give way earlier in April.  According to the story, the cemetery tried to save the bank, but couldn’t so they did they next best thing and acted quickly to move the caskets buried in that section, the Garden of the Good Shepherd, to another location inside the cemetery.

What didn’t happen, however, is that families were not notified of the situation first.  Again, according to the article, families did not know that their loved ones were being moved.  Cemetery personnel did mention that they have been trying to contact families, some by mail as that is the only contact information that they may have.  Cemetery official Joseph Dispenza said, “Eventually. . . people will understand that we had to provide mindful, perpetual care.”

The New York State Division of Cemeteries has confirmed that it is currently looking into the situation and has made an on-site visit to St. Matthews Cemetery.  To that, according to the article, Dispenza said, “They have been here. . . they are supportive of what we are doing.”

You can see additional coverage from WIBV here.

Funeral Director Daily take:  This is a tough situation for the cemetery to be in.  It appears that once they realized that they could not stop a portion of the cemetery from sliding into Cayuga Creek, they had to act fast to save the casketed remains from that section of the cemetery.

They maybe did not have time to call 220 families before commencing with the operation, however, they probably should have been more active in trying to contact families continuously as the operation was underway.

However, in this day and age that might have been difficult also.  Many of those remains were probably buried when the next of kin had  a land line and now, as we are in the cord-cutting revolution, many relatives probably had only cell phone numbers that had not been updated to the cemetery records.

The articles and news videos don’t tell us enough to get all the answers, but I would suggest that not having any of the casketed remains slide into Cayuga Creek would, in my book, be a win for both the cemetery and family members.

[wpforms id=”436″ title=”true” description=”true”]